In a week in which former allies in a redividing globe separately commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war, the sense of a runaway descent towards a third world war draws ever closer.

The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness to resort to unbridled state-sponsored violence and the irrelevance of the institutions of the rules-based order have all been on brutal display this week. From Kashmir to Khan Younis, Hodeidah, Port Sudan and Kursk, the only sound is of explosions, and the only lesson is that the old rules no longer apply.

Indeed Fiona Hill, the policy analyst and adviser to the UK government on its imminent strategic defence review, argues the third world war has already started, if only we would recognise it.

The fear of a world in which no one, due to science or globalisation, is any longer in control is hardly new: the concept was the title of two Reith lectures, one in 1967 by the social anthropologist Edmund Leach and another in 1999 by the political philosopher Anthony Giddens. But rarely has been it so clear that the rules-based world order created in 1945 is in headlong retreat.

The former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband put it well this week at Chatham House, saying: “I know that people always say the world is changing, but this feels like a moment of genuine geopolitical flux, at least as significant as 1989-90 when the world transitioned from the cold war to a unipolar moment, and for me the Trump administration is both symptom and cause of the changes under way.

“The problem is that it’s much more clear what we are inflecting from – a world in which the US was the anchor of the global system – but it’s not clear what we’re inflecting to. I know there’s a lot of talk about the idea of a multipolar world reflecting a redistribution of the balance of power, but I find that concept conveying too much stability, too much security.”

His one-time mentor Tony Blair, in a talk in California, argued: “Everyone has been shaken out of their comfort zone. The noise you are hearing from the political undergrowth is the frantic foraging for options. People are rethinking their position in the world and their relationships. There is no doubt at all this is a major shock. This is the most significant geostrategic event I can remember in terms of America and the world.”

For the former US secretary of state Antony Blinken, Donald Trump’s indifference to alienating allies is an act of vandalism. He said diplomats around the world were asking: “What the fuck is going on?”

Blinken said America had spent 80 years building up trust, strong economic partnerships and military and political alliances, and if that was then taken down in a matter of 100 days it would be incredibly hard to rebuild.

“It means countries look for ways to work around us, to work together but without the US,” he said. “The possibility that what will be said today will be reversed tomorrow, and will be reversed again, means they simply cannot count on us. Joe Biden used to say it is never a good idea to bet against America. The problem we now have is people are no longer betting on America.”

Trampling on the rules

The doleful consequences of America’s withdrawal have been visible all week. It may or may not be a world war but it is a world at war.

In Gaza the world has watched as a blockade on food, aid and medical supplies, in defiance of binding orders by the international court of justice (ICJ), has now entered into its third month. Israel, in search of security, has in the past month bombed Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. It is daily urging the US to be given permission to bomb Iran.

Trump can hardly complain when Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s ultra-right finance minister, shared his vision for the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, predicting that within half a year the population of the territory would be confined to just a narrow swathe of land, with the remainder “totally destroyed”. Smotrich was only repeating a version of Trump’s plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians, a plan totally at odds with the ceasefire terms his envoy had negotiated.

In remarks at a “settlements conference”, Smotrich also declared that Israel would “apply sovereignty” in the West Bank within the lifetime of the current government, which is due to expire in October 2026 unless elections are called earlier. “Within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Smotrich said. “In another six months, Hamas won’t exist as a functioning entity.”

With Trump silent, it was left to Europe to respond. “It is time for the European Union and the entire international community to wake up,” said the Belgian foreign minister, Maxime Prévot. He denounced the blockade as “an absolute disgrace … It is not acceptable; deliberately cutting off all humanitarian aid, all access to food, healthcare, electricity and water, as a war strategy, is totally unacceptable.”

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “If we condemn Russia for violating Ukrainian sovereignty, we cannot remain silent when it happens in Gaza. Hamas must be fought, yes, but not at the cost of trampling on all the rules.”

He called for a united response by Europe, yet at a foreign affairs meeting in Poland the 27 ministers could not even agree on a joint statement, let alone joint action to suspend its free trade agreement with Israel, a Dutch proposal.

Meanwhile in Port Sudan, the conduit for humanitarian aid into Sudan, Rapid Support Forces drones destroyed infrastructure, just as Israeli bombs have sought to do this week in Hodeidah, the chief entry point for aid into Yemen.

On Monday an effort by the Sudanese government to hold the United Arab Emirates accountable at the ICJ for directing arms to the RSF ended in failure. The UAE, like many other nations, is a signatory to the genocide convention, but it has entered a reservation insisting its compliance with the convention is not subject to ICJ proceedings. The ICJ meekly concluded there was a manifest lack of jurisdiction. Only one judge, Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf from Somali, objected.

So the UAE gains kudos of signing the convention without needing to be judged on meeting its obligations. It has been left to the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, to make a valiant effort to coax the parties to a ceasefire, but so far it has foundered. The US, by contrast, labels RSF leaders as genocidal but does nothing in practical diplomatic terms.

In Kashmir, where two nuclear-armed states are firing rockets at one another’s aircraft, there is a conspicuous absence of American interest. The US has no ambassador in India or Pakistan and no senior state department official appointed. The conflict is not making waves in US media, and Trump’s initial response was “it’s a shame” and that “if you think about it they have been fighting for many, many decades, and centuries, actually”.

In previous disputes between India and Pakistan it took a decisive US intervention to help calm both sides. In July 1999 in Washington, Bill Clinton personally browbeat Pakistan’s then leader, Nawaz Sharif, into retreat in what one official called the most important meeting with a foreign leader of Clinton’s presidency.

The former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo revealed in his memoir how close the two sides came in February 2019 to a nuclear conflagration, something he frantically helped stop from a secure hotel room on a visit to Hanoi. Unnervingly, India is no longer framing the issue as terrorism but as a state-on-state dispute by saying the underlying issue is Pakistan acting as a shield for terrorism.

A decent betrayal

These conflicts may be disconnected save the common thread of absent US leadership and permanent upheaval. But in Ukraine the structural elements of the world war come together, Hill argues. The scale of the death toll may be different to the second world war, but according to the UK military this week Russia has suffered 900,000 casualties, far in excess of its losses during previous wars in Chechyna and Afghanistan.

Moreover, the wars are now, in her words, “system-changing conflicts with multivector loads of countries involved”. Chinese-flagged trawlers with Russians onboard rupturing undersea cables in the Baltic Sea is only one part of Vladimir Putin’s global war.

China, North Korea and Iran are all supporting Russia, some in more material ways such as building drone factories or supplying soldiers. A host of other countries have been happy to keep Russia economically afloat in ways that make their neutrality contestable. India, with which the UK has completed a free trade deal this week, has bought €112bn of oil from Russia since the war started, and also bought Russian arms.

The conflict has been presented by Russia and its allies as a war about American hegemony. Trump clearly had a plan to extricate the US from the line of fire and to put relations with Russia on a different footing, a desire he has nursed since the 1980s. Trump sees the world in similar terms to Putin – a handful of sovereign powers dividing up land into spheres of influence. His dream is to re-enact Yalta 1945 alongside Putin and possibly Xi Jinping, with Europe an onlooker and Ukraine dismembered. But organising a decent betrayal has proved more difficult than expected.

In the White House, Trump famously told Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards.” But Trump overplayed the cards he had, throwing many of them away with his self-destructive tariff war. And it emerged that Zelenskyy did in fact have a few cards left, deploying them skilfully by offering a 30-day ceasefire, a minerals deal with the US, and focusing on Ukraine’s military value to western security.

The intimate photo of Trump and Zelenskyy in conclave at the funeral of the pope (a picture taken by Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak) reeked of reconciliation yet flattered Trump’s ego. A change in mood in Washington is now discernible. Even JD Vance, the vice-president, once agitator-in-chief against Zelenskyy, this week admitted Russia was “asking for too much” and said Europe and the US were “on the same team”.

Europe’s leaders would dearly welcome that, but there is now a clarity across Europe, and not just in Paris, that regardless of Vance’s reassurance, Europe has to have the capability to operate autonomously of the US. Trump is self-evidently not reliable, and his benign assessment of Putin’s intentions is not shared.

Planning for a European reassurance force in Ukraine is under way, as is planning for a potential Russian attack on Europe. Since February, France and the UK, through a combined joint expeditionary force, have formed the nucleus of that planning, but this has broadened, with new political leadership increasingly coming from four members of the Weimar+ group: Poland, France, Germany and the UK.

In a speech marking VE Day, the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, explained the double necessity for Europe to be prepared for war. Russia’s war of aggression had shattered the European security order, with the imperial delusion that the war in Ukraine could be conflated with the great patriotic war. Then he added: “The fact that now even the United States, who did so much to create and shape this order, is turning its back on it is a shock on an entirely new scale. That is why I speak of a double epochal shift – Russia’s war of aggression and the US break with its values – that is what marks the end of this long 20th century.”

Europe, he insisted, must decide what comes next.

Simon Mann, an Eton and Sandhurst-educated ex-SAS officer, who led a botched coup involving Margaret Thatcher’s son to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, has died aged 72.

Mann led a group of 70 fellow mercenaries who were arrested in Zimbabwe in 2004 for attempting to topple Equatorial Guinea’s despotic president, Teodoro Obiang.

Mann and his friend Mark Thatcher admitted involvement in the attempted plot, which became known as the “wonga coup”. When the plot was revealed, Obiang threatened to eat Mann’s testicles and drag his naked body through the streets.

Mann served more than five years in two of the world’s most notorious jails before being pardoned by Obiang himself.

He had previously served in the Scots Guards and the SAS before setting up a number of security firms specialised in protecting oil installations.

In March 2004 Mann, Nick du Toit and three other South African mercenaries plotted Obiang’s overthrow with international financial backers and the tacit approval of at least three governments, most notably Spain.

The coup involved flying into the former Spanish colony in a plane loaded with arms and more than 50 black “Buffalo soldiers” – former members of the now disbanded South African defence forces’ elite 32 battalion– to replace Obiang with an exiled opposition activist called Severo Moto.

In return, the plotters and their backers were hoping to tap into Equatorial Guinea’s reserves of oil and natural gas. But their plane was intercepted by the Zimbabweans at Harare airport. A jubilant President Robert Mugabe threw Mann and his fellow conspirators into jail before handing them over to Equatorial Guinea where a court sentenced the mercenary to 34 years in jail.

In a note sent out to his legal team while he was being held, Mann implicated Thatcher, whom he referred to by the name Scratcher, in the coup. The note also pleaded for a “large splodge of wonga” and that Thatcher use his influence to secure his release.

In his trial, Mann admitted he had been approach by Ely Calil, a Lebanese oil tycoon who was a friend of Moto, who regarded himself as head of Equatorial Guinea’s government in exile.

Thatcher was alleged to have paid for a helicopter to fly Moto from Equatorial Guinea during the planned coup. He was fined and given a four-year suspended sentence for his part in the coup after admitting breaking anti-mercenary legislation. But he claimed he was only unwittingly involved in the plot.

In 2006 the plot was dramatised in Coup!, a TV movie written by the comic John Fortune.

After his pardon, Mann returned to the UK. He was married three times and had nine children. MailOnline reported that he had died earlier this week while exercising in a gym.

Immigrants in Texas who were told they would be deported to Libya sat on a military airfield tarmac for hours on Wednesday, unsure of what would happen next, an attorney for one of the men has said.

The attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, told the news agency Reuters that his client, a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, was among the immigrants woken in the early morning hours and bussed from an immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, to an airfield where a military aircraft awaited them.

After several hours, they were bussed back to the detention center around noon, the attorney said on Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the state department did not respond to requests for comment.

Reuters was first to report that the Trump administration was poised to deport immigrants held in the US to Libya, despite a court order against such a move, in a development that would escalate Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Officials earlier this week told Reuters the US military could fly the immigrants to the north African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could change.

A US official said the flight never departed. As of Friday, it was unclear if the administration was still planning to proceed with the deportations.

A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that any effort by the Trump administration to deport non-Libyan immigrants to Libya without adequate screenings for possible persecution or torture would clearly violate a prior court order.

Lawyers for a group of immigrants pursuing a class action lawsuit had made an emergency request to the court hours after the news broke of the potential flight to Libya.

Nguyen, who declined to name his client, said the man was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya. The man, who can not read English well, declined to sign it and was placed in solitary confinement and shackled along with others, the attorney said.

The man was never provided an opportunity to express a fear of being deported to Libya as required under federal immigration law and the recent judicial order, Nguyen said.

“They said: ‘We’re deporting you to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed the form, he didn’t know what the form was,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen said his client, originally from Vietnam, has lived in the US since the 1990s but was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) earlier this year during a regular check-in, which is becoming more common.

Vietnam declines to accept some deportees and processes deportation paperwork slowly, Nguyen said, making it harder for the US to send deportees there.

There have been talks between the US and the east African nation of Rwanda about also deporting people there.

Food rations for a million people in Uganda have been cut off completely this week amid a funding crisis at the United Nations World Food Programme, raising fears that refugees will now be pushed back into countries at war.

The WFP in Uganda warned two weeks ago that $50m (£37m) was urgently needed to help refugees and asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Sudan.

Uganda hosts Africa’s largest refugee population of 1.8 million, with 60,000 new arrivals in the last three months. Malnutrition rates had reached a crisis point, said the UN agency.

“Due to severe funding shortages, @WFP_Uganda has cut 1 million refugees entirely off from food assistance,” the agency announced via social media.

“Malnutrition has reached critical levels (15% +) in refugee reception centres, and general food rations have been cut by up to 80%,” it said.

In March, the WFP slashed food relief, introducing rationing for new arrivals to the east African country.

Hillary Onek, Uganda’s minister for refugees, said it was a direct result of the radical aid cuts by the US and European countries.

Donald Trump’s freeze on US aid spending in January and the UK’s cut in aid spending the following month from 0.58% of gross national income to 0.3% have badly hit Uganda’s ability to look after refugees.

“The problem is beyond and outside our control. The global funding to support refugees has dwindled. The money given to the World Food Programme to buy food was cut off. The refugees are going to suffer the consequences,” Onek said.

“Aid can’t be depended on any more. Trump came and radically cut off funds to support refugee programmes. Other countries who have been contributing, most of them are not honouring their small contributions. WFP and UNHCR are in a total crisis because of lack of funding,” he said.

Just 46% of the $858m required in the multi-agency Uganda Country Refugee Response Plan was funded in 2024.

“It’s impossible for us now to shoulder the burden of refugee challenge alone. I see there is going to be impending confusion, increased violence and war,” said Onek.

“These people [refugees] will be looking for something to survive. They want to be alive. They will go into people’s cassava gardens, uproot them and that is war and confusion. We don’t know how we shall overcome that impending confusion,” he said.

UNHCR launched an appeal for $44m last month to support 55,000 new Congolese refugees and an additional 25,000 expected to arrive over the next six months.

“This rapid influx has placed considerable pressure on basic social services, including education, food, shelter, health and nutrition services, and WASH [water, sanitation and hygiene] infrastructure,” the UNHCR said.

“These conditions have strained the already limited resources, further worsened by the surge in new arrivals, lengthy processing times and the strain on transportation services for refugees.”

Simon Okello, a South Sudanese refugee in Bidi Bidi refugee camp, one of Africa’s largest, said the cuts would cause starvation and malnutrition.

“We are totally messed up. This has complicated our lives totally,” he said. “We have been surviving on food rations and coupons. How are we going to get food to eat now? People will starve and die.”

“Without food now, people might be forced to go back to their home countries where we fled from or engage in illegal activities to get something to eat,” he said.

Activists fear Uganda may now begin forced repatriations, something Onek said Uganda’s cabinet would shortly be discussing.

“The other option available is that those refugees whose countries are peaceful, we should change our policies and make sure we force them to go back to their homes and leave us alone,” said Onek. “I will have to discuss it with my cabinet colleagues and then we see what direction to take.”

Dismas Nkunda, director of Atrocities Watch Africa, said: “We saw this coming. It began with the self-reliance programme where UN bodies started to go slow on the provision of humanitarian assistance.

“Matters were not helped by the coming of Trump as president and his cuts in funding for the UN.

“My fear is that host countries such as Uganda may be forced to become radical and reverse their otherwise good policies in hosting refugees,” he said.

The Trump administration is planning to deport a group of migrants to Libya, according to reports, despite the state department’s previous condemnation of the “life-threatening” prison conditions in the country.

Libya’s provisional government has denied the reports.

Reuters cited three unnamed US officials as saying the deportations could happen this week. Two of the officials said the individuals, whose nationalities are not known, could fly to the north African country as soon as Wednesday, but they added the plans could still change. The New York Times also cited a US official confirming the deportation plans.

It was not clear what Libya would be getting in return for taking any deportees.

Libya is a major transit point for Europe-bound asylum seekers. For years, human rights organisations have documented how migrants trapped in the country are at the mercy of militias and smugglers. Tens of thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa are kept indefinitely in overcrowded refugee detention centres where they are subjected to systematic abuses and torture.

In its annual human rights report released last year, the US state department criticised Libya’s “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” and “arbitrary arrest or detention,’’ citing how migrants , including children, had “no access to immigration courts or due process”.

The White House, state department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The news has sparked condemnation from aid agencies and NGOs that operate in the central mediterranean, which have long warned about the harsh conditions faced by asylum seekers in Libya. They have also accused European governments of being complicit in such treatment by working with Libya to intercept migrants.

‘‘For 10 years now since our foundation, as a search and rescue organisation, we have continuously highlighted that Libya is not a safe place for migrants and refugees,’’ said Mirka Schäfer, a political expert for the German search-and-rescue organisation SOS Humanity. ‘‘Evidence from survivors on board our vessel Humanity 1, includes refugees with traces of torture on their bodies, gunshot wounds, pain caused by beatings, physical and psychological wounds while in transit, in detention camps in Libya, or fleeing Libya across the Mediterranean.’’

One person aboard the Humanity 1 ship said criminal groups operating in Libya “sell people like they would sell bread”.

Luca Casarini, the Italian founder of the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans, said the reported move by Trump was “‘an endorsement of the horror that has characterised his administration’s policies since the very beginning”.

‘‘Libya is one of the most hellish places on earth, where mafias and smugglers operate with the complicity of the European Union. But Trump goes a step further. The American president claims ownership of this horror by deporting people to a hell that is Libya, flaunting his power. It is a move that drags our civilisation toward the abyss.’’

Libya’s government of national unity said on Wednesday it rejected the use of its territory as a destination for deporting migrants without its knowledge or consent. The government added there was no coordination with the US regarding the reception of migrants.

Trump, who made immigration a major issue during his election campaign, has launched aggressive enforcement action since taking office, increasing troops to the southern border and pledging to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the US.

As of Monday, the Trump administration has deported 152,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump’s administration has tried to encourage migrants to leave voluntarily by threatening steep fines, trying to strip away legal status, and sending migrants to notorious prisons in Guantánamo Bay and El Salvador.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, last week said the US was not satisfied with sending migrants only to El Salvador, and hinted that Washington was looking to expand the number of countries to which it may deport people.

“We are working with other countries to say: We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings, will you do this as a favour to us,” Rubio said at a cabinet meeting at the White House last Wednesday. “And the further away from America, the better.”

A fourth US official said the administration has for several weeks been looking at a number of countries to send migrants, including Libya.

On 19 April the supreme court temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelans it accused of being gang members.

Trump’s administration, which has invoked a rarely used wartime law, has urged the justices to lift or narrow their order.

Reuters contributed to this report.

The Trump administration is planning to deport a group of migrants to Libya, according to reports, despite the state department’s previous condemnation of the “life-threatening” prison conditions in the country.

Libya’s provisional government has denied the reports.

Reuters cited three unnamed US officials as saying the deportations could happen this week. Two of the officials said the individuals, whose nationalities are not known, could fly to the north African country as soon as Wednesday, but they added the plans could still change. The New York Times also cited a US official confirming the deportation plans.

It was not clear what Libya would be getting in return for taking any deportees.

Libya is a major transit point for Europe-bound asylum seekers. For years, human rights organisations have documented how migrants trapped in the country are at the mercy of militias and smugglers. Tens of thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa are kept indefinitely in overcrowded refugee detention centres where they are subjected to systematic abuses and torture.

In its annual human rights report released last year, the US state department criticised Libya’s “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” and “arbitrary arrest or detention,’’ citing how migrants , including children, had “no access to immigration courts or due process”.

The White House, state department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The news has sparked condemnation from aid agencies and NGOs that operate in the central mediterranean, which have long warned about the harsh conditions faced by asylum seekers in Libya. They have also accused European governments of being complicit in such treatment by working with Libya to intercept migrants.

‘‘For 10 years now since our foundation, as a search and rescue organisation, we have continuously highlighted that Libya is not a safe place for migrants and refugees,’’ said Mirka Schäfer, a political expert for the German search-and-rescue organisation SOS Humanity. ‘‘Evidence from survivors on board our vessel Humanity 1, includes refugees with traces of torture on their bodies, gunshot wounds, pain caused by beatings, physical and psychological wounds while in transit, in detention camps in Libya, or fleeing Libya across the Mediterranean.’’

One person aboard the Humanity 1 ship said criminal groups operating in Libya “sell people like they would sell bread”.

Luca Casarini, the Italian founder of the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans, said the reported move by Trump was “‘an endorsement of the horror that has characterised his administration’s policies since the very beginning”.

‘‘Libya is one of the most hellish places on earth, where mafias and smugglers operate with the complicity of the European Union. But Trump goes a step further. The American president claims ownership of this horror by deporting people to a hell that is Libya, flaunting his power. It is a move that drags our civilisation toward the abyss.’’

Libya’s government of national unity said on Wednesday it rejected the use of its territory as a destination for deporting migrants without its knowledge or consent. The government added there was no coordination with the US regarding the reception of migrants.

Trump, who made immigration a major issue during his election campaign, has launched aggressive enforcement action since taking office, increasing troops to the southern border and pledging to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the US.

As of Monday, the Trump administration has deported 152,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump’s administration has tried to encourage migrants to leave voluntarily by threatening steep fines, trying to strip away legal status, and sending migrants to notorious prisons in Guantánamo Bay and El Salvador.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, last week said the US was not satisfied with sending migrants only to El Salvador, and hinted that Washington was looking to expand the number of countries to which it may deport people.

“We are working with other countries to say: We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings, will you do this as a favour to us,” Rubio said at a cabinet meeting at the White House last Wednesday. “And the further away from America, the better.”

A fourth US official said the administration has for several weeks been looking at a number of countries to send migrants, including Libya.

On 19 April the supreme court temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelans it accused of being gang members.

Trump’s administration, which has invoked a rarely used wartime law, has urged the justices to lift or narrow their order.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Sudan’s security and defence council has declared that it will break diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates over its alleged backing of the paramilitary Sudanese Rapid Support Forces.

During a televised speech on Tuesday, Sudan’s defence minister, Yassin Ibrahim, said Sudan was “severing diplomatic relations with the UAE” and recalling its ambassador, claiming the Gulf nation had breached Sudan’s sovereignty through its RSF “proxy”, which has been fighting the army in a bloody civil war since April 2023.

The UAE insists it does not provide arms to the RSF, and on Monday fended off an attempt to persuade the international court of justice in The Hague to examine Sudan’s claims the UAE was complicit in a genocide in Darfur. The ICJ said it could not examine the claim because the UAE, a party to the genocide convention, had put in a reservation that prevented the ICJ adjudicating on claims that the UAE had breached the convention.

Sudan’s diplomatic move came as alliance of aid agencies working in Sudan expressed deep concern about what it described as “the deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure in Port Sudan”, the main artery for aid into the north African country.

A succession of drone and missile attacks, starting on 4 May, have hit Port Sudan international airport, fuel storage facilities, the maritime port, at least one hotel, as well as water and power facilities, in direct violation of the fundamental principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law, the NGOs said.

They said: “These assaults have caused widespread fires, heavy smoke over residential areas, and flight cancellations, further endangering the lives and wellbeing of thousands of innocent civilians”.

Since the conflict’s outset, aid agencies have depended on Port Sudan – and particularly its airport and seaport – as the main conduit for international assistance. It has also become the home to many internationally displaced people relocated from different states.

The United Nations has been forced to suspend humanitarian flights to Port Sudan after these strikes, a step that wil inevitably limit the delivery of lifesaving aid.

The agencies said damage to power stations was also forcing them to rely on generator power, raising concerns about looming fuel shortages.

They said: “Further bombardment of energy and water infrastructure will deepen the risk of disease outbreaks, malnutrition, and protection crises among the most vulnerable, including women, children, and the elderly. It will also severely constrain aid agencies’ ability to respond to the growing needs in Sudan.

“We urge all parties to the conflict to fully respect their obligations under the Geneva conventions, to differentiate between military objectives and civilian objects, and to facilitate unimpeded humanitarian access to all areas in need.”

A British-led effort to set up a contact group among the external states both in the region and in the west to help take the first steps to create a broad roadmap for peace foundered at a London conference, partly due to differences between the UAE and Egypt.

Talks between Rwanda and the US to host deported migrants is the latest move by the African country to position itself as a useful option for the anti-migration policies of allied governments.

Previous high-profile attempts, however, including with the UK, Israel and Denmark, failed after becoming beset by controversy.

On Sunday, Olivier Nduhungirehe said the talks with Washington DC were in the early stages. The Rwandan foreign minister told state TV: “Those reports are true. We are engaged in discussions with the government of the United States of America.”

The US-based Handbasket newsletter first reported discussions between Rwanda and the US last month, citing a US State Department cable saying Rwanda had agreed to take in deportees who were unable to be sent to their home countries for fear of persecution.

Although details about the planned deal are scant, this is not the first time that Rwanda has explored such an arrangement for resettlement.

In 2022, the country entered an agreement with a previous UK government to receive asylum seekers from Britain. Under the deal, asylum claims would be processed in Rwanda. Successful applicants would remain there, while unsuccessful ones would be given the option to leave Rwanda or receive residency.

The agreement, which included plans for financial support for relocation and accommodation, faced legal challenges as well as criticism from opposition politicians and human rights activists. The government said it would tackle illegal migration and aid Rwandan development. But critics said it was unlawful and posed risks for the safety of refugees.

The deal, which cost the UK hundreds of millions of pounds, eventually fell through when Keir Starmer cancelled it after the Labour party came into power last year.

In his address on Sunday, Nduhungirehe acknowledged Rwanda’s previous experience with similar migration plans, saying the US idea was “not something new to us”.

Rwanda was also previously involved in a programme between 2014 and 2017 to take African asylum seekers from Israel. The agreement was shrouded in secrecy, but details started emerging in 2018 as Israel’s supreme court weighed whether to approve a programme to give African migrants the option of a cash incentive for deportation or be detained indefinitely.

In 2017, Volker Türk, the assistant high commissioner for protection at the UN refugee agency, said 4,000 people from Eritrea and Sudan had been relocated under the 2014-17 programme to two African countries “named in media reports as Rwanda and Uganda”.

The scheme collapsed when Israel’s supreme court suspended deportations in 2018.

Rwanda has also explored a migration deal with Denmark. After the European country’s passage of a law to process asylum seekers outside Europe in 2021, the two countries announced that they were looking at establishing a programme for the transfer of asylum seekers arriving in Denmark to Rwanda for consideration of their asylum applications and protection, with the option of settling in Rwanda.

They said: “The current global asylum and migration system is dysfunctional and a new approach is required.”

Critics condemned it, saying Denmark was shifting responsibility for refugee protection. In 2023, the country paused the plan, seeking to work with other EU countries in a regional solution.

Paul Kagame has in the past defended migration plans to send people to Rwanda. Speaking on state television in 2022, the Rwandan president said: “We are not involved in buying and selling of people, with the UK or anybody. It’s just a problem that needs to be solved and Rwanda is ready to help.”

The latest talks with the US present an opportunity for the country to financially leverage the migrant crisis in the west as well as expand its geopolitical influence.

Notably, the discussions are happening at a time when the US is pushing Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to enter bilateral economic agreements with the US that would bring western investment to support mining in the countries.

The proposed deals are part of a US-led process to end fighting in the mineral-rich eastern DRC, where Rwanda has been accused of fuelling the conflict by backing rebels.

Talks between Rwanda and the US to host deported migrants is the latest move by the African country to position itself as a useful option for the anti-migration policies of allied governments.

Previous high-profile attempts, however, including with the UK, Israel and Denmark, failed after becoming beset by controversy.

On Sunday, Olivier Nduhungirehe said the talks with Washington DC were in the early stages. The Rwandan foreign minister told state TV: “Those reports are true. We are engaged in discussions with the government of the United States of America.”

The US-based Handbasket newsletter first reported discussions between Rwanda and the US last month, citing a US State Department cable saying Rwanda had agreed to take in deportees who were unable to be sent to their home countries for fear of persecution.

Although details about the planned deal are scant, this is not the first time that Rwanda has explored such an arrangement for resettlement.

In 2022, the country entered an agreement with a previous UK government to receive asylum seekers from Britain. Under the deal, asylum claims would be processed in Rwanda. Successful applicants would remain there, while unsuccessful ones would be given the option to leave Rwanda or receive residency.

The agreement, which included plans for financial support for relocation and accommodation, faced legal challenges as well as criticism from opposition politicians and human rights activists. The government said it would tackle illegal migration and aid Rwandan development. But critics said it was unlawful and posed risks for the safety of refugees.

The deal, which cost the UK hundreds of millions of pounds, eventually fell through when Keir Starmer cancelled it after the Labour party came into power last year.

In his address on Sunday, Nduhungirehe acknowledged Rwanda’s previous experience with similar migration plans, saying the US idea was “not something new to us”.

Rwanda was also previously involved in a programme between 2014 and 2017 to take African asylum seekers from Israel. The agreement was shrouded in secrecy, but details started emerging in 2018 as Israel’s supreme court weighed whether to approve a programme to give African migrants the option of a cash incentive for deportation or be detained indefinitely.

In 2017, Volker Türk, the assistant high commissioner for protection at the UN refugee agency, said 4,000 people from Eritrea and Sudan had been relocated under the 2014-17 programme to two African countries “named in media reports as Rwanda and Uganda”.

The scheme collapsed when Israel’s supreme court suspended deportations in 2018.

Rwanda has also explored a migration deal with Denmark. After the European country’s passage of a law to process asylum seekers outside Europe in 2021, the two countries announced that they were looking at establishing a programme for the transfer of asylum seekers arriving in Denmark to Rwanda for consideration of their asylum applications and protection, with the option of settling in Rwanda.

They said: “The current global asylum and migration system is dysfunctional and a new approach is required.”

Critics condemned it, saying Denmark was shifting responsibility for refugee protection. In 2023, the country paused the plan, seeking to work with other EU countries in a regional solution.

Paul Kagame has in the past defended migration plans to send people to Rwanda. Speaking on state television in 2022, the Rwandan president said: “We are not involved in buying and selling of people, with the UK or anybody. It’s just a problem that needs to be solved and Rwanda is ready to help.”

The latest talks with the US present an opportunity for the country to financially leverage the migrant crisis in the west as well as expand its geopolitical influence.

Notably, the discussions are happening at a time when the US is pushing Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to enter bilateral economic agreements with the US that would bring western investment to support mining in the countries.

The proposed deals are part of a US-led process to end fighting in the mineral-rich eastern DRC, where Rwanda has been accused of fuelling the conflict by backing rebels.

Nigerians, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans applying to work or study in the UK face Home Office restrictions over suspicions that they are most likely to overstay and claim asylum, Whitehall officials have claimed.

The government is working with the National Crime Agency to build models to profile applicants from these countries who are likely to go on to claim asylum.

Whether such a scheme would be successful depends on the strength of the models and the intelligence they work with, according to a migration expert.

Nearly 10,000 asylum claimants who had arrived in the UK legally on work or study visas were living in taxpayer-funded accommodation, such as hotels, at some point last year.

Data disclosed by the Home Office in March showed that of those asylum seekers who had originally entered on a visa but then ended up in government accommodation, the most common nationalities were Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.

The Guardian revealed on Saturday that the government planned to reduce the numbers of UK student visa holders who make asylum claims.

Officials will be instructed to use the bank statements submitted by visa holders as part of their assessment when deciding whether to grant them asylum accommodation.

According to the Times, the Home Office is attempting to build intelligence to enable caseworkers to spot patterns in the profiles of people who are most likely to abuse work and study visas as a loophole to claim asylum. They have earmarked Pakistani, Nigerian and Sri Lankan visa holders as the most likely to go on to apply for asylum.

Officials are working with the NCA to build a model that would reject a visa claim from a person who fits the profile of someone likely to go on to claim asylum.

Madeleine Sumption, the director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said it was difficult to assess whether the government and the NCA would be able to create such a model.

“The key question, and one that is hard to assess from the outside, is do they have the information to accurately decide who is likely to claim asylum after they arrive. Because obviously it can be quite difficult.

“Whether it’s effective will depend on whether patterns are obvious enough for them to accurately be able to do it, or whether it will lead to some more arbitrary outcomes. Without being on the inside, it really is difficult to know.

“I could imagine scenarios where it could have quite a big impact. I can also imagine scenarios where it actually only affects a relatively small number of people,” she said.

Asked if the government’s plans could lead to legal challenges on the grounds of discrimination, Sumption said: “I’m not a lawyer, but the government has a fair amount of discretion on work and study to decide whether someone gets a visa or not when someone’s coming from outside of the country.

“There are cases when there are potentially some legal avenues, but broadly speaking the government is allowed to discriminate on many different grounds when granting work and study visas.”

Drones struck the airport and targeted an army base in Port Sudan on Tuesday, officials said, the third straight day the seat of power of the government, which is aligned with the Sudanese army, has come under attack.

The country’s main fuel depot was hit on Monday, causing a massive blaze just south of the eastern city that had until Sunday been considered a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of displaced people fleeing a two-year war.

An Agence France-Presse correspondent reported loud explosions at dawn on Tuesday and plumes of smoke over the coastal city, one coming from the direction of the port and another from a fuel depot just south.

One drone struck “the civilian section of the Port Sudan airport”, an airport official told AFP, two days after the facility’s military base was first attacked in drone strikes the army blamed on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

All flights were grounded at the war-torn country’s main international port of entry, the source added.

Another drone targeted the main army base in the city centre, an army source said, while witnesses reported a nearby hotel was hit.

Both sites are close to the residence of Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has been at war with his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the commander of the RSF, since April 2023.

A third drone hit a fuel depot near the southern port in the densely populated city centre, where the UN, aid agencies and hundreds of thousands of displaced people have relocated from Khartoum.

Witnesses in the city’s north reported anti-aircraft fire from a military base.

The RSF has increasingly relied on drones since losing territory including nearly all of Khartoum in March, attacking deep into army-held territory.

Explosions were heard early on Tuesday morning across Port Sudan, where the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Monday reports of paramilitary attacks were a “worrying development threatening the protection of civilians and humanitarian operations”.

Nearly all humanitarian aid into Sudan, where famine has already been declared and nearly 25 million people are suffering dire food insecurity, arrives in Port Sudan.

At the airport, where Sudanese airlines had resumed flights after Sunday’s strike, “fires broke out in multiple buildings” following the explosion, a traveller told AFP. The army source said the strike had also “targeted fuel depots at the airport”.

The RSF has in recent weeks attacked civilian infrastructure across the army-controlled north-east, causing widespread blackouts for millions of people.

Since it began, the war has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted 13 million and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises. It has effectively split the country in two, with the army controlling the centre, north and east while the RSF holds nearly all of the vast region of Darfur and, with its allies, parts of the south.

According to experts, the RSF’s increased reliance on drones since its loss of Khartoum has highlighted its reach and hindered the army’s supply line. The RSF has used both makeshift and highly advanced drones, which the army accuses the United Arab Emirates of supplying.

The International Court of Justice on Monday threw out a case brought by Sudan against the UAE, accusing it of complicity in genocide by supporting the RSF.
Sudan’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it “respected” the ruling, which came on the basis of the ICJ’s lack of jurisdiction due to the UAE’s 2005 “reservation” on the UN genocide convention.

Rwanda confirmed on Monday that discussions were “underway” with the United States regarding a potential agreement to host deported migrants.

Rwanda’s foreign minister, Olivier Nduhungirehe, told state media on Sunday that the talks were in the “early stage.” When asked by the Associated Press on Monday, he confirmed the talks.

Nduhungirehe did not disclose the specifics of the potential deal for Rwanda, but previous local media reports suggest that the US would likely fund a program to have migrants integrated into the society through stipends and job assistance initiatives.

The minister said a migrant deal between Rwanda and the US would be consistent with Rwanda’s longstanding commitment to humanitarian cooperation and the pursuit of migration solutions.

The US state department declined to comment on a potential deal with Rwanda, but said engagement with foreign governments was an important part of the US government’s policy to deter illegal migration.

This wouldn’t be Rwanda’s first time hosting deported migrants. The east African nation previously had an agreement with the UK to host migrants. Plans for the initiative, including prepared accommodations, were in the final stages but the deal collapsed after the Labour party took office in 2024. A similar plan in Australia also failed.

Rwanda has faced allegations of human rights abuses and is in the process of brokering a peace deal with the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo where Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have been behind attacks in the mineral rich eastern Congo region.

Nduhungirehe told state media on Sunday that Rwanda and Congo had already submitted their respective draft proposals, which will form the basis of a final peace agreement document expected to be signed in the US next month.

An attempt by Sudan’s government to make the United Arab Emirates legally accountable for acts of genocide in West Darfur has been rejected by the international court of justice after the judges voted by 14 to 2 to declare they had no jurisdiction. By a narrower majority the judges voted 9 to 7 to strike the case entirely from the ICJ list.

The two-year civil war in Sudan has seen repeated allegations that the UAE has been flying arms to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in a bid to oust the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

However, when the UAE signed up to article IX of the genocide convention in 2005, it inserted a reservation stating it would not allow disputes about the interpretation, application and fulfilment of the convention to be resolved at the ICJ.

The ICJ ,president, Yuji Iwasawa, acknowledged that Sudanese government lawyers in presenting their case has claimed that the RSF had engaged in “extra judicial killing, ethnic cleansing, rape, enforced disappearances and burning of villages as well as killing on an ethnic basis”.

The court was “deeply concerned about [how] the unfolding conflict led to untold loss of life and suffering in west Darfur”. But, the president said, the UAE reservation had been formulated in clear terms, and was not incompatible with the purpose of the genocide convention.

The judges’ ruling was largely expected but marks a second diplomatic victory in the UAE efforts to ward off allegations that it has been prolonging the bloody two-year civil war by arming the RSF. A UN panel of experts report on 29 April published no evidence that the UAE were arming the RSF.

Speaking after the ICJ ruling in the Hague, , deputy assistant minister for political affairs at the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Quite simply, today’s decision represents a resounding rejection of the Sudanese Armed Forces’ attempt to instrumentalise the court for its campaign of misinformation and to distract from its own responsibility.

“The facts speak for themselves: the UAE bears no responsibility for the conflict in Sudan. On the contrary, the atrocities committed by the warring parties are well-documented.

“The international community must focus urgently on ending this devastating war and supporting the Sudanese people, and it must demand humanitarian aid reaches all those in need. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces must stop fighting, must stop weaponising aid, and must endorse civilian leadership independent from military control as the only foundation for sustainable peace.”

The ICJ ruling that it had no jurisdiction is controversial for some. A group of prestigious international jurists last week backed a legal opinion from the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights argued: “While some narrowly tailored reservations to article IX of the genocide convention might be permissible, blanket reservations to the entirety of article IX should be rejected as invalid”.

They argued “the utility of the genocide convention is not for states to adopt these principles in the abstract, which exist with or without the convention, but to bind states to comply with its terms.

“To allow states to exempt themselves from the genocide convention’s only judicial mechanism not only undermines the integrity of the convention, but also the efficacy, foreseeability, and reliability of the international system as a whole.

Currently 153 states are party to the genocide convention, with 16 states inserting blanket reservations including the UAE. The UK has been one of a group of influential states that have argued such broad reservations may be incompatible with the convention.

In its opinion, the Wallenberg Centre concluded: “The current expectation that the court bend to the will of outlier reserving states seeking to evade participation in cases as significant as genocide should be reversed. In 2025, these states should not have the final word before the judicial process even begins. They should be compelled to account for their actions in a court of law.”

Scotland Yard has received a dossier of evidence documenting myriad alleged war crimes committed by a paramilitary group during the conflict in Sudan.

Lawyers have submitted a 142-page file of evidence to the war crimes unit of the Metropolitan police containing details of numerous atrocities perpetrated by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Compiled by a London-based team of barristers specialising in international law, it documents killings, torture and mass rape. It has been drawn up to support global efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and the lawyers have requested that the Met unit – part of the force’s counter-terrorism command known as SO15 – reviews the dossier before passing it to the international criminal court (ICC) to assist investigations into RSF atrocities in Darfur, in the west of Sudan.

Now into its third year, the catastrophic war between the RSF and the Sudanese military has prompted the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, killed at least 150,00 people and forced 12 million from their homes.

The lawyers said the documents, given to the Met on Monday, offer evidence that the RSF’s leadership are responsible for repeated war crimes, focusing on the legal principle of “command responsibility” – that commanders knew or ought to have known about the atrocities committed by their troops.

Former international judge Sir Howard Morrison described the dossier’s weight of evidence as “compelling”.

“The novel approach through the highly regarded offices of SO15 adds great impetus to the potential accountability of those responsible for the atrocities that have been visited upon numerous victims in Darfur,” Morrison said.

The lead lawyer, Lucia Brieskova, added: “We believe this submission will contribute to the fight against impunity suffered by many in Darfur in Sudan.”

The case was instructed by a Sudanese pro-democracy supporter, whom the Guardian is not naming for security reasons.

It comes as the international court of justice is expected to deliver a verdict on whether the United Arab Emirates can plausibly be found “complicit in the commission of genocide” by arming the RSF in Sudan’s civil war.

The case was brought by Sudan who said the UAE has been arming the RSF with the aim of wiping out the non-Arab Masalit population of west Darfur. The UAE has said the case is a cynical publicity stunt.

Recently the Trump administration characterised atrocities committed by the RSF in Darfur as genocide, reaffirming a designation made by the Biden administration in January.

The submission sent to Scotland Yard says evidence assembled by the UN, human rights groups and the media, proved war crimes in Darfur were perpetrated by RSF troops.

“Steps should have been taken by the RSF leadership to address the situation.

“Taken together, this direct and circumstantial evidence makes it clear that the RSF leadership either knew, or at least should have known, that the war crimes were being committed by the RSF in Darfur. Therefore, they have a case to answer under international criminal and humanitarian law,” it states.

Although the ICC investigation is focusing on war crimes in Darfur, reports of atrocities being committed throughout the country continue to emerge.

Last week, footage circulated online showed at least 31 people, including children, were killed by the RSF in Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman.

The Sudanese army also faces accusations of committing atrocities against civilians, with its leaders sanctioned by the US.

At nine years old, Patience Nabukalu was devastated when her friend, Kevin, died in severe flooding that hit their Kampala suburb, Nateete, a former wetland. Witnessing deaths and the destruction of homes and livelihoods in floods made worse by extreme rainfall has had a profound impact on her.

She decided to try to bring about change – to do what she could to amplify the voices of those in the Ugandan communities worst affected by the climate crisis.

Now 27, Nabukalu is one of several young climate activists who travelled to London this week to attend what has been predicted to be the last in-person AGM held by HSBC. They will deliver a letter to the bank’s CEO, Georges Elhedery, urging him to stop financing the expansion of oil, gas and coal projects and harmful industrial agribusiness, and to stop providing money to companies that forcibly remove people from their homes to make way for such infrastructure.

“This is an opportunity to talk to real people, not just an HSBC office,” said Nabukalu, speaking before the meeting at the Intercontinental hotel. “I will be so happy to get the chance to hand over the letter and to ask: ‘Has HSBC measured the damage they have done by financing corporations that are driving the climate crisis?’”

The letter refers to a 2023 Action Aid report, which identifies HSBC as “the largest European financier of fossil fuels in the global south”, channelling $63.5bn (£48bn) into fossil fuel activities between 2016 and 2022.

The letter to Elhedery, from young people all over the world, refers to HSBC’s plans, announced earlier this year, to review its commitment to scaling back its financing of fossil fuels.

“This has made something very clear: you value profit margins and boardroom agendas more than the lives of millions of people bearing the full brunt of your decisions,” the letter reads.

Environmentalists criticised HSBC after it delayed key parts of its climate goals by 20 years, and watered down environmental targets in a new long-term bonus plan for Elhedery that could be worth up to 600% of his salary. In February, the lender said it was reviewing its net zero emissions policies and targets – which are split between its own operations and those of the companies it finances – after realising its clients and suppliers had “seen more challenges” in cutting their carbon footprint than expected.

The activists’ letter asks “that you not only stand by your commitments to end your support for the fossil fuel industry in line with what the science requires, but also put an end to all lending and underwriting for corporations involved in fossil fuel expansion”.

Nabukalu will also urge the bank to stop funding corporations that are backing the east African crude oil pipeline from Uganda to Tanzania. Once constructed, the pipeline would produce an estimated 379m tonnes of CO₂ over 25 years. The main backers of the multimillion-dollar pipeline are the French oil company TotalEnergies and the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

Nabukalu, who has visited people living along the proposed route, said: “This pipeline is already causing damage even before its construction. Thousands and thousands of people have been displaced. They were promised land titles, but have none. Their livelihoods have been sabotaged. They cannot build agriculture, the water table is low, so they have little access to water.

“These people should be at the centre of the bank’s decisions.”

“We will talk to HSBC and ask them to stop financing fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis,” said Nabukalu. “By continuing to finance TotalEnergies they are destroying our future.”

A report published in April found that those displaced along the pipeline’s proposed route had reported being inadequately compensated and rehoused.

Some western banks have declined to fund it after pressure from a coalition of organisations and community groups.

A spokesperson for HSBC said: “We follow a clear set of sustainability risk policies which support our ambition to align the financed emissions in our portfolio to net zero by 2050. We do not comment on client relationships.”

Ugandan opposition politicians have accused the president, Yoweri Museveni, of attempting to quash dissent by prosecuting opponents on politically motivated charges in military courts in the run-up to presidential and legislative elections next year.

The government is pushing to introduce a law to allow military tribunals to try civilians despite a supreme court ban on the practice.

In November, the opposition politician Kizza Besigye was detained in Nairobi, Kenya, alongside his aide Obeid Lutale and taken to Kampala where they were charged before a military tribunal with offences including illegal possession of firearms, threatening national security, and later treachery, which carries the death penalty. His lawyers say the charges are politically motivated.

Besigye, a four-time presidential candidate and longtime opponent of Museveni, is one of more than 1,000 civilians, including activists and other politicians, who have been charged in military courts since 2002.

In January, Uganda’s supreme court ruled that trying civilians in military courts was unconstitutional and ordered the transfer of trials involving civilians to ordinary courts. Museveni rejected the ruling as the “wrong decision” and vowed to continue using military courts.

After a 10-day hunger strike by Besigye in February, authorities moved his trial to a civilian court. But the Uganda Law Society says the government has not transferred other people’s cases.

In the latest twist, the government is planning to introduce a law to allow military tribunals to try civilians for some offences. Norbert Mao, the minister for justice and constitutional affairs, told parliament on 17 April that the draft legislation was awaiting cabinet approval before introduction in parliament.

Paul Mwiru, a politician with Bobi Wine’s National Unity Platform party, said Museveni’s administration was using state institutions to instil fear and had “made the judicial system to be inclined” in its favour.

Mwiru, a former MP, was charged in a civilian court with treason in 2018 alongside Wine and 31 other people for allegedly throwing stones at Museveni’s motorcade during chaos at a byelection campaign. Mwiru said people who went through botched court processes “come back weakened”. Their case was adjourned indefinitely after about two years.

He said amending the law to allow military prosecution of civilians would allow the government “to charge you and arraign you in the court if they have a disagreement with you”.

Uganda will go to the polls in January 2026 in what will be a seventh election featuring Museveni.

The events of the past few months have turned the spotlight on what critics deem intolerance and authoritarianism by Museveni’s administration and ignited fears of an election that may not be free and fair. “Sooner rather than later, they’ll be able to arrest any of us. If they want to deny you the opportunity to participate in the electoral process, they can do that,” said Mwiru, who plans to contest for a parliamentary seat again next year.

November was not the first time Besigye, a former army colonel, had been tried in a military court. In 2005, four years after retiring from the military and running for the first time as a presidential candidate, he was charged with terrorism and possession of firearms.

Other civilians who have been prosecuted in military courts include Wine, the musician-turned-politician who has said he will stand again next year, former opposition MP Michael Kabaziguruka and Besigye’s lawyer Eron Kiiza. The list also includes opposition supporters, as well as other political opponents and government critics.

Critics say repression extends to civilian courts too, with dissidents and government critics charged there being subjected to lengthy trials, denial of bail and detentions without trial. Besigye and Lutale were this month denied bail for their case. They remain in custody.

Government and military spokespeople have been approached for comment. Museveni has repeatedly defended using military courts for civilians, saying it was necessary for the east African country’s peace and stability. He claims civilian courts were failing to convict those accused of violent crimes.

Trials of civilians in military court go back to 2002 when Museveni created an autonomous, ad-hoc law enforcement unit to combat armed crime in reaction to the alleged failure of the civilian judicial system to prosecute and punish crimes. Later, in 2005, the state amended legislation regulating the military to create a legal framework to allow the military to court martial civilians.

Human rights activists say the practice is unjust and unlawful and frequently violates the right of accused people to a fair trial.

In many instances over the years, Ugandan courts have ruled against the practice, but the process has continued. The latest ruling by the supreme court, arising from Kabaziguruka’s challenge of his trial in military court in 2016, is a litmus test.

The government is fighting back with the planned introduction of the draft law that Mao, the justice minister, told lawmakers would define “exceptional circumstances under which a civilian may be subject to military law”.

Museveni became president in 1986 after leading rebels in a six-year guerilla war to remove President Milton Obote. He led the country to economic growth and democratic change after years of political decay.

But critics say judicial independence has eroded in the country over the years. They have also condemned his long stay in office using what they say are strongman tactics to extend it indefinitely, including by amending the constitution twice to remain in power.

The Museveni administration’s military roots influence the government’s operations, said Gerald Walulya, a senior lecturer at Makerere University in Kampala and a political analyst. “Because of their background as a government that came to power through a military kind of route, they tend to approach every aspect in a military manner,” he said.

Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a historian, said Uganda was experiencing “the curse of liberation”, which he said made leaders feel entitled to power. “Those who have liberated people from repressive regimes in Africa have taken it upon themselves that they are entitled to rule,” he said.

Ndebesa said the administration was “weaponising the justice system for political ends” to suppress political dissent, and that suppression had a “chilling effect” of creating fear in the political space.

“The purpose is not only to suppress that very individual, but also to send a message to the political sphere.” he added.

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is setting up an inquiry into whether past ANC governments interfered with the investigation and prosecution of apartheid-era crimes, amid criticism from the families of victims.

A group of 25 relatives and survivors of apartheid-era deaths and violence sued the government in January, claiming that interference from “the highest levels of government” blocked investigations into cases referred to the National Prosecuting Authority by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

On Wednesday, the presidency said in a statement: “Allegations of improper influence in delaying or hindering the investigation and prosecution of apartheid-era crimes have persisted from previous administrations.

“Through this commission, President Ramaphosa is determined that the true facts be established and the matter brought to finality … President Ramaphosa appreciates the anguish and frustration of the families of victims, who have fought for so many years for justice.”

The families suing the government include those of four men known as the Cradock Four, who were beaten, strangled with telephone wire, stabbed and shot to death in one of the most notorious killings of South Africa’s apartheid era.

In 1999, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) denied six security officers amnesty for their role in the killings of Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto, Matthew Goniwe and Sicelo Mhlauli. The officers were never prosecuted and are all now dead.

The families criticised Ramaphosa’s decision that an inquiry should assess their claims for “constitutional damages” – their high court case asked for 167m rand (£7.3m) to fund further investigations and litigation, as well as memorials and public education – and said that their rights were violated.

They said in a statement that an inquiry would have no authority over these areas and would only be able to offer advice. “This fundamental shortcoming was pointed out to the president’s legal team, as well as the fact that it will likely result in the issues remaining unresolved for years. This will perpetuate the pain and trauma that the families and survivors have experienced for many years.”

South Africa’s governments have been led by the African National Congress party of Nelson Mandela since the end of apartheid over 30 years ago.

In March, Thabo Mbeki, who was president from 1999 to 2008, and the former justice minister Brigitte Mabandla applied to intervene in the families’ high court case. Mbeki has repeatedly denied interfering in decisions to prosecute apartheid-era cases.

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is setting up an inquiry into whether past ANC governments interfered with the investigation and prosecution of apartheid-era crimes, amid criticism from the families of victims.

A group of 25 relatives and survivors of apartheid-era deaths and violence sued the government in January, claiming that interference from “the highest levels of government” blocked investigations into cases referred to the National Prosecuting Authority by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

On Wednesday, the presidency said in a statement: “Allegations of improper influence in delaying or hindering the investigation and prosecution of apartheid-era crimes have persisted from previous administrations.

“Through this commission, President Ramaphosa is determined that the true facts be established and the matter brought to finality … President Ramaphosa appreciates the anguish and frustration of the families of victims, who have fought for so many years for justice.”

The families suing the government include those of four men known as the Cradock Four, who were beaten, strangled with telephone wire, stabbed and shot to death in one of the most notorious killings of South Africa’s apartheid era.

In 1999, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) denied six security officers amnesty for their role in the killings of Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto, Matthew Goniwe and Sicelo Mhlauli. The officers were never prosecuted and are all now dead.

The families criticised Ramaphosa’s decision that an inquiry should assess their claims for “constitutional damages” – their high court case asked for 167m rand (£7.3m) to fund further investigations and litigation, as well as memorials and public education – and said that their rights were violated.

They said in a statement that an inquiry would have no authority over these areas and would only be able to offer advice. “This fundamental shortcoming was pointed out to the president’s legal team, as well as the fact that it will likely result in the issues remaining unresolved for years. This will perpetuate the pain and trauma that the families and survivors have experienced for many years.”

South Africa’s governments have been led by the African National Congress party of Nelson Mandela since the end of apartheid over 30 years ago.

In March, Thabo Mbeki, who was president from 1999 to 2008, and the former justice minister Brigitte Mabandla applied to intervene in the families’ high court case. Mbeki has repeatedly denied interfering in decisions to prosecute apartheid-era cases.

Kyle believed God was looking out for him when he survived a violent farm robbery in South Africa eight years ago with only a black eye and broken ribs. The robbers failed to get the kettle and iron working, so were unable to burn anyone. Then the gun trigger jammed when they tried to shoot Kyle in the spine.

“They specifically said they were coming back for this farm … [that] it was their land,” said the 43-year-old, who did not want to use his full name. “Only afterwards, we found out that the guy that stays on the plot was actually killed … the farmhand … I don’t know what his name was.”

Kyle, a divorced father of three, is one of thousands of white South Africans hoping to take up Donald Trump’s offer of refugee status, to escape crime and what they allege is discrimination against white people.

The Trump administration’s support for these claims, while stopping other new refugee arrivals, has inflamed uncomfortable conversations about how far racial reconciliation still has to go, three decades after the end of white minority rule.

The US president’s offer was a “godsend”, said Kyle, now a salesman working remotely for an overseas company: “I’ve got white children, they’re at the bottom of the hiring list here. So, there is no future for them. And the sad thing is they don’t even know what apartheid is.”

White Afrikaner governments racially segregated every aspect of life from relationships to where people were allowed to live during apartheid, repressing South Africa’s Black majority while keeping the white minority safe and much better off.

South Africa remains deeply unequal, more than 30 years since the system ended. The black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, for example, compared with 9.2% for white people.

Affirmative action has created a Black elite, but also nurtured feelings of disfranchisement among some white South Africans. Less than two-thirds of white South Africans agreed that apartheid deprived black people of their livelihoods, v three-quarters of Black South Africans, according to the 2023 Reconciliation Barometer, a survey by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, a thinktank.

Kate Lefko-Everett, the report’s author, said: “The level of contact and interaction between South Africans of different race groups has not really changed substantially.”

South Africa’s high violent crime rate – in the last quarter of 2024 there were almost 7,000 murders, according to police figures – affects everyone. But it has also added to a siege mentality among some white people. Almost two-thirds of white people were considering emigrating, compared with 27% of all South Africans, according to 2022 Afrobarometer data.

More than 8,200 people have registered their interest in US refugee status, the New York Times reported in March. The US embassy in Pretoria refused to comment.

Chilly Chomse, a 43-year-old carpenter, said he wanted to claim asylum for the sake of his four daughters.

He moved to Orania, a white, Afrikaner-only town, for work during the Covid-19 pandemic, but said he was not committed like some residents: “Once you leave this Orania premises, you are still in South Africa … you’re not safe and you can’t remain here 24/7 for the rest of your life.”

While some white English-speaking South Africans like Kyle hope the refugee programme will include them too, Trump’s February executive order referred to “ethnic minority Afrikaners”. It claimed a recently signed South African law that allows land expropriation in limited circumstances would enable the government to seize Afrikaners’ property, while state policy was “fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavoured landowners” (a longstanding far-right claim).

When Esté Richter, a friend of Chomse’s in Orania, heard about Trump’s refugee policy, she initially did not believe it. “Then I felt that someone has heard us, finally, that someone has heard the cries of Afrikaners,” said Richter, 35, who homeschools her two children and helps her husband with plumbing jobs.

“The main reason why we are looking at the refugee programme is in September 2022 my husband’s father was murdered on his farm,” she said. Richter’s mother-in-law was burned with a hot iron, beaten up and abandoned in the bush, but survived.

The Afrikaner rights group AfriForum met Trump allies in the US during his first term, claiming the South African government was “complicit” in white farmer murders. The group, which has 300,000 members, continues to claim that “Afrikaners are the target”.

Rudolph Zinn, a University of Limpopo professor, noted South African police data on farm attacks – which listed 12 “farming community” murders in the final quarter of 2024 – included black smallholder farms and non-commercial plots.

He said: “It’s definitely not linked to any political motive or a specific race. It’s all about the money.”

Zinn said imprisoned farm robbers he interviewed said they would tailor their language to instil as much fear as possible to get victims to hand over cash and valuables. “If it’s a white victim, then they would say: ‘I hate you because you’ve taken our land.’ But the very same offender would, when it’s a Black victim, say: ‘You’re a coconut, black on the outside, but inside you’re white.’”

Both AfriForum, which promotes staying in South Africa, and the prospective refugees raised the controversial Kill the Boer song as a reason for their fears. A South African court ruled in 2022 that the song, sung by the populist, far-left Economic Freedom Fighters party at political rallies, was not meant literally.

Others said South Africa risked a “white genocide”, a conspiratorial claim repeated by Trump’s billionaire, South African-born adviser Elon Musk.

Sam Busa, a 60-year-old business consultant of British descent, wants to claim asylum for herself and her three adult sons. She set up an “Amerikaners” website and social media pages to disseminate information, and gathered 30,000 signatures to thank Trump for offering refugee status.

She said: “We’re in, in my personal opinion, an advanced stage of a genocide potentially unfolding. What that does is it effectively throws out any argument about economic status.”

Kyle believed God was looking out for him when he survived a violent farm robbery in South Africa eight years ago with only a black eye and broken ribs. The robbers failed to get the kettle and iron working, so were unable to burn anyone. Then the gun trigger jammed when they tried to shoot Kyle in the spine.

“They specifically said they were coming back for this farm … [that] it was their land,” said the 43-year-old, who did not want to use his full name. “Only afterwards, we found out that the guy that stays on the plot was actually killed … the farmhand … I don’t know what his name was.”

Kyle, a divorced father of three, is one of thousands of white South Africans hoping to take up Donald Trump’s offer of refugee status, to escape crime and what they allege is discrimination against white people.

The Trump administration’s support for these claims, while stopping other new refugee arrivals, has inflamed uncomfortable conversations about how far racial reconciliation still has to go, three decades after the end of white minority rule.

The US president’s offer was a “godsend”, said Kyle, now a salesman working remotely for an overseas company: “I’ve got white children, they’re at the bottom of the hiring list here. So, there is no future for them. And the sad thing is they don’t even know what apartheid is.”

White Afrikaner governments racially segregated every aspect of life from relationships to where people were allowed to live during apartheid, repressing South Africa’s Black majority while keeping the white minority safe and much better off.

South Africa remains deeply unequal, more than 30 years since the system ended. The black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, for example, compared with 9.2% for white people.

Affirmative action has created a Black elite, but also nurtured feelings of disfranchisement among some white South Africans. Less than two-thirds of white South Africans agreed that apartheid deprived black people of their livelihoods, v three-quarters of Black South Africans, according to the 2023 Reconciliation Barometer, a survey by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, a thinktank.

Kate Lefko-Everett, the report’s author, said: “The level of contact and interaction between South Africans of different race groups has not really changed substantially.”

South Africa’s high violent crime rate – in the last quarter of 2024 there were almost 7,000 murders, according to police figures – affects everyone. But it has also added to a siege mentality among some white people. Almost two-thirds of white people were considering emigrating, compared with 27% of all South Africans, according to 2022 Afrobarometer data.

More than 8,200 people have registered their interest in US refugee status, the New York Times reported in March. The US embassy in Pretoria refused to comment.

Chilly Chomse, a 43-year-old carpenter, said he wanted to claim asylum for the sake of his four daughters.

He moved to Orania, a white, Afrikaner-only town, for work during the Covid-19 pandemic, but said he was not committed like some residents: “Once you leave this Orania premises, you are still in South Africa … you’re not safe and you can’t remain here 24/7 for the rest of your life.”

While some white English-speaking South Africans like Kyle hope the refugee programme will include them too, Trump’s February executive order referred to “ethnic minority Afrikaners”. It claimed a recently signed South African law that allows land expropriation in limited circumstances would enable the government to seize Afrikaners’ property, while state policy was “fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavoured landowners” (a longstanding far-right claim).

When Esté Richter, a friend of Chomse’s in Orania, heard about Trump’s refugee policy, she initially did not believe it. “Then I felt that someone has heard us, finally, that someone has heard the cries of Afrikaners,” said Richter, 35, who homeschools her two children and helps her husband with plumbing jobs.

“The main reason why we are looking at the refugee programme is in September 2022 my husband’s father was murdered on his farm,” she said. Richter’s mother-in-law was burned with a hot iron, beaten up and abandoned in the bush, but survived.

The Afrikaner rights group AfriForum met Trump allies in the US during his first term, claiming the South African government was “complicit” in white farmer murders. The group, which has 300,000 members, continues to claim that “Afrikaners are the target”.

Rudolph Zinn, a University of Limpopo professor, noted South African police data on farm attacks – which listed 12 “farming community” murders in the final quarter of 2024 – included black smallholder farms and non-commercial plots.

He said: “It’s definitely not linked to any political motive or a specific race. It’s all about the money.”

Zinn said imprisoned farm robbers he interviewed said they would tailor their language to instil as much fear as possible to get victims to hand over cash and valuables. “If it’s a white victim, then they would say: ‘I hate you because you’ve taken our land.’ But the very same offender would, when it’s a Black victim, say: ‘You’re a coconut, black on the outside, but inside you’re white.’”

Both AfriForum, which promotes staying in South Africa, and the prospective refugees raised the controversial Kill the Boer song as a reason for their fears. A South African court ruled in 2022 that the song, sung by the populist, far-left Economic Freedom Fighters party at political rallies, was not meant literally.

Others said South Africa risked a “white genocide”, a conspiratorial claim repeated by Trump’s billionaire, South African-born adviser Elon Musk.

Sam Busa, a 60-year-old business consultant of British descent, wants to claim asylum for herself and her three adult sons. She set up an “Amerikaners” website and social media pages to disseminate information, and gathered 30,000 signatures to thank Trump for offering refugee status.

She said: “We’re in, in my personal opinion, an advanced stage of a genocide potentially unfolding. What that does is it effectively throws out any argument about economic status.”

The family of the imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah say they fear for his health along with that of his mother, Laila Soueif, as both continued their hunger strikes to demand his freedom.

Relatives of Soueif said they were worried she was “dying in slow motion” after eight months on full or partial hunger strike. “What are we supposed to do, just sit around and wait to die?” said Soueif.

Fattah, who is in prison near Cairo, received medical treatment for vomiting and severe stomach pains earlier this week, after consuming nothing but herbal tea, black coffee and rehydration salts for more than 55 days.

He began a hunger strike on the day his mother was admitted to St Thomas’ hospital in London in February, almost 150 days into her own hunger strike, where she received a glucose drip intended to save her life.

Soueif started a hunger strike last September, after Fattah reached five years in prison – the length of his sentence – in the Wadi el-Natrun desert prison. The Egyptian authorities, who jailed him on terrorism charges for a social media post about torture, claim his sentence will end in January 2027.

“Alaa started his strike when he was notified that I’d gone into hospital. Now he’s sick, alone, in prison and we did not even know about it until he had been sick for a week. What more can we do?” said Soueif, who has grown increasingly desperate, saying that the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, is ignoring demands to free her son.

Fattah became a British citizen through Soueif in 2021 while incarcerated. His family had hoped that acquiring British citizenship would rapidly increase pressure on the Egyptian authorities to free the author, computer programmer and activist who is known as one of the Arab world’s most prominent prisoners of conscience.

Earlier this year, Soueif began a daily sit-in while on hunger strike at the gates of Downing Street in an attempt to pressure Starmer to speak directly with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, and demand he free her son.

When her blood sugar dropped to dangerous levels after months without food, Soueif was hospitalised. She later met with Starmer in mid February.

The prime minister told parliament a week later that “I will do everything I can, to ensure the release in this case, and that includes phone calls as necessary. I’ve raised it before. I’ll raise it again. We raise it, and will continue to do so. I gave my word to the family that that’s what I’d do. That I will do, and I will.”

He spoke to Sisi on 28 February where he “pressed for Alaa’s release”, according to a Downing Street readout of their call.

That conversation prompted Soueif to switch to a partial hunger strike of 300 calories per day, and she was discharged from hospital in early March. But in the two months since Starmer and Sisi spoke, there have been few signs of a shift from either government.

“I started taking some 300 calories a day when the prime minister and President Sisi talked. But that was two months ago now and nothing has happened,” said Soueif.

A spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office said that “securing the release of Mr el-Fattah remains an absolute priority, so that he can be reunited with his family. We continue to press for consular access.”

The UK foreign minister, David Lammy, spoke with his Egyptian counterpart on 9 April, they added.

Soueif’s nephew Omar Robert Hamilton said his aunt’s health was failing as she attempted to survive on a partial hunger strike. The 68-year-old activist and mathematics professor appears withered after months without real sustenance and is no longer able to stand upright.

“Three hundred calories a day is not enough to sustain life, her muscles are being eaten away,” he said. “It’s like she is dying in slow motion.”

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have “supercharged” a global rollback of human rights, pushing the world towards an authoritarian era defined by impunity and unchecked corporate power, Amnesty International warns today.

In its annual report on the state of human rights in 150 countries, the organisation said the immediate ramifications of Trump’s second term had been the undermining of decades of progress and the emboldening of authoritarian leaders.

Describing a “freefall” in human rights, the report said growing inaction over the climate crisis, violent crackdowns on dissent and a mounting backlash against the rights of migrants, refugees, women, girls and LGBTQ+ people could be traced to the so-called Trump effect.

Amnesty warned the situation would deteriorate further this year as Trump continued to dismantle the rules-based world order that Washington helped to build from the devastation of the second world war.

Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, described the US president’s swift and deliberate targeting of international institutions designed to make the world safer and fairer as “terrifying”.

“You look forward to the end of this decade and wonder whether the basic frameworks and underpinnings of not just human rights but international law will still be standing. You probably haven’t been able to say that since 1935,” he said.

Amnesty’s report also documents how mass arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and lethal force are becoming increasingly widespread tools of repression.

In Bangladesh, “shoot-on-sight” orders during student protests led to hundreds of deaths; Mozambique’s disputed elections similarly sparked a deadly crackdown; and Turkey also imposed draconian bans on demonstrations.

The report also identified global inaction as an area of concern, particularly in relation to Sudan’s ruinous civil war. One of the warring sides there, the Rapid Support Forces, has been accused of repeatedly carrying out mass sexual violence against women and girls yet international action remains muted.

Trump’s sweeping foreign aid cuts had made conditions worse across the world, Amnesty said, closing crucial programmes in states such as Yemen and Syria, leaving children and survivors of conflict without access to food, shelter or healthcare.

Amnesty also raised concerns over failures to uphold international humanitarian law, citing Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

In Europe, Amnesty said Russia killed more Ukrainian civilians in 2024 than the previous year and continued to target non-military infrastructure. Trump is proposing that Ukraine cede territory to Russia as part of peace proposals dismissed as appeasement by critics.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said: “Trump has shown only utter contempt for universal human rights – emboldening anti-rights movements worldwide and letting corporate allies run amok.”

Looking further ahead, the report warned that governments risked failing future generations on the climate, economic inequality and corporate power.

It cited the collapse of the UN’s Cop29 climate conference, under fossil-fuel corporations’ influence, while rich countries “bullied” low-income nations into accepting inadequate climate financing.

Trump’s exit from the crucial Paris climate agreement threatened “to drag others with him”, Amnesty warned.

Elsewhere, against a backdrop of scapegoating migrants, “billionaires gained wealth as global poverty reduction stalled”, it said.

Women, girls and LGBTQ+ people faced intensifying attacks in a number of countries including Afghanistan and Iran, while LGBTQ+ rights were targeted in Uganda, Georgia and Bulgaria.

“The Trump administration fanned the flames, cutting support for gender equality and dismantling protections for trans people and women globally,” Amnesty said.

Diplomats from eight southern and east African countries have signed a letter calling on the UK government to support a private member’s bill that aims to speed up debt restructurings, after economic crises meant countries were unable to pay back loans.

Poor countries’ economies have been hit by a series of global events in recent years, including the coronavirus pandemic, which reduced growth; the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sent inflation soaring; and raised US interest rates, which have pushed up the cost of international loans to often unaffordable levels.

Since 2020, countries including Zambia, Sri Lanka and Ghana have defaulted on their overseas debts.

Countries that can no longer afford to repay their debts have to negotiate loan writedowns or extensions with lenders including state-owned development banks from China, the US and Europe, in a process known as a debt restructuring.

A growing number of poorer countries would also need to restructure loans from private banks and international bonds owned by western companies, which are typically more expensive. Most poor countries have cheap loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which give new “concessional” loans instead of writing down old ones.

The UK bill, introduced in November 2024 by the Labour MP Bambos Charalambous, would “prevent private creditors suing countries while debt relief negotiations are taking place, and from seeking higher repayments than other creditors”, said a letter sent to the British chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in March and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

The average developing country is spending 9.5% of government revenues repaying debt, double the level of a decade ago. The poorest countries are spending 15%, according to the UN development programme. From 2012 to 2022, public spending on debt grew faster than on health and education.

The letter said “90% of debt owed to private creditors by the world’s poorest countries is governed by English law and is transacted through the City of London. This is why any relief from undue profit to private lenders relies on your government.”

Signatories included high commissioners to the UK from Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa, which has made tackling the “unprecedented debt crisis among many African countries” a priority of its G20 presidency this year.

Charalambous said he hoped the government would adopt the bill and that he had met the Treasury minister Emma Reynolds. A UK government spokesperson said: “The UK fully agrees that private creditors should participate in restructurings on comparable terms. Overall, we have seen evidence of private creditors’ willingness to engage and provide debt treatments where needed, including for Zambia and Ghana.

“As such, the UK is not currently pursuing a legislative approach to ensuring private creditor participation in restructurings, although we continue to keep our position under review.”

After the Covid pandemic hit, lending countries agreed to pause debt repayments. However, western private creditors refused, an issue that aggrieved China.

Zambia stopped repaying its international debts in November 2020. Along with Ethiopia and Chad it sought to restructure its loans in early 2021 under a new G20 process called the common framework. However, the process was fraught with delays.

It took 17 months for Chad to reach a deal that did not cut debt levels, after the commodities trader Glencore dragged out negotiations.

Chinese intransigence reportedly held up Zambia’s agreement with lending countries until 2023. Those countries then rejected a deal the Zambia government reached with western bondholders, as they said it was better than their deal. A bonds agreement was finally reached in 2024.

Some officials and analysts argued the UK bill was targeting a prior problem of western “vulture funds” buying up poor countries’ defaulted bonds to sue them for payouts. They said recent restructurings had been delayed by the proliferation of new types of lenders, including Chinese state-owned institutions and African multilateral trade banks.

Abebe Aemro Selassie, the IMF’s Africa director, told a press conference last week that he was not sure new legislation would speed up debt restructurings: “In recent restructurings, I am not aware of [private creditors holding out] being the main hindrance.”

Since 2014, the inclusion of “collective action clauses” – where the owners of 75% of a country’s bonds can approve a restructuring deal – in 88% of bonds has stopped most “vulture fund” minority bondholders from suing countries, the thinktank ODI said in a report.

However, Ethiopia’s negotiations to cut the value of its single bond have reportedly been delayed by a bondholder group.

In Zambia, Malawi and Ghana, the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and Trade & Development Bank (TDB) have not agreed to loan writedowns. Both are regional trade banks set up by African governments that lend at high interest rates but have demanded to be excluded from restructurings like the IMF and World Bank.

Spokespeople for Afreximbank and TDB did not respond to requests for comment.

“Non-bond private creditors … are very different … and it is unlikely that the solutions provided in the [UK] bill would apply easily to them,” said Frederique Dahan, a director at ODI.

Malawi, which has a GDP per head of $580, has been trying to get debt writedowns while being battered by climate and economic shocks that have led to fuel, fertiliser and medicine shortages.

Thomas Bisika, Malawi’s high commissioner to the UK and who signed the letter supporting Charalambous’s bill, said: “This unsustainable debt has really grossly affected social and economic development in the country.”

On the road running from Maiduguri’s airport to the city, the freshly repainted walls of a girls’ college stood in defiant opposition to a years-long campaign by the jihadists of Boko Haram to make good on their name, which translates as “western education is forbidden”.

At a nearby roundabout on the outskirts of the capital of Nigeria’s north-eastern Borno state, three uniformed men sprinted after a cement truck, hoping to collect a road levy. As the driver sped away, they slowed down in the 42C heat, smiled regretfully, and waited for the next heavy duty vehicle to pass.

At the peak of Boko Haram’s 15-year insurgency, bombs went off with frightening regularity at the popular Monday market. But the city – known as the birthplace of Boko Haram – has not suffered a major attack since February 2021, and the low-key security atmosphere reflected its relative tranquility.

The group was founded in 2002, but its campaign of terror took off in 2009, after the killing of its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, by police in July of that year. More than 36,000 people were killed and 2.2 million others displaced. In one particularly notorious incident 11 years ago this month, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from a school in the town of Chibok.

Many outside the region assumed the insurgency had been extinguished, but on 8 April this year Borno’s governor, Babagana Zulum, issued a troubling warning: Boko Haram was staging a comeback. Zulum told a meeting of security agents that renewed attacks and kidnappings were occurring “almost on a daily basis without confrontation”, in a sign that the state’s authorities were “losing ground”.

Zulum made the warning less than a month after gunmen raided two military bases in Borno and his security convoy reportedly intercepted a Boko Haram ambush attempt. The number of fatalities in both cases remains unclear.

In response to Zulum, a spokesperson for the military authorities said: “The military is sacrificing a lot, and our efforts should be appreciated.”

Nigeria’s information minister, Mohammed Idris, also said the armed groups have been “largely dissipated”, toeing the tone of his predecessor Lai Mohammed, who in 2015 said they had been “technically defeated”.

“We’re not saying that we have 100% exterminated Boko Haram,” Idris said after the security meeting. “But I think that we’ve degraded Boko Haram significantly for them to pose any kind of significant challenge for us as a country.”

Zulum fired back: “I believe he is naive about what is happening in the country.”

In recent years, a multinational coalition between Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria has reclaimed territory controlled by Boko Haram and helped to secure garrison towns from attacks. The group has simultaneously been weakened by a split into two factions that often fight among themselves.

In January 2024, Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s president, promised to “stamp out the remaining vestiges of Boko Haram, Ansaru, banditry and kidnapping gangs”.

“We won’t rest until every agent of darkness is completely rooted out,” he added.

However, analysts have said troops are struggling to contain jihadists in the “Timbuktu Triangle” – a term referencing the Malian city, a former jihadist stronghold – and used to denote an area stretching from eastern Yobe state into western Borno.

Beyond the attacks on army bases, local reports said 40 farmers were reportedly killed and several others kidnapped by Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) in January. The latter faction split to ally with Islamic State and has taken on a different style, taxing some villages and small towns that they control and remitting taxes to commanders.

There are also fears that thousands of displaced households sent from camps back to their villages under a resettlement scheme may now be under threat.

As long as ago as 2023 the International Crisis Group warned of the resettlement scheme: “The hasty process is endangering displaced people’s lives – putting them closer to the fighting and cutting them off from support. By exposing civilians to hardship, the government risks giving jihadist groups an opportunity to forge ties with relocated communities and draw benefits from their economic activities.”

The situation in Yobe is tense. In September 34 people were killed in an attack, then in March a pro-Tinubu media outlet reported that villagers in Gujba, where more than 40 students were massacred in 2013, had been given eviction notices by Boko Haram for helping the army defeat the jihadists in a recent battle. The authorities claimed there was “no credible intelligence” backing the report.

In late March, Niger withdrew from the military coalition, prompting concerns about intelligence sharing and the capacity to keep jihadists at bay after the exit of French and American troopsfrom the Sahel. A new and much bigger regional force, established this year, is yet to get on its feet.

In Maiduguri, some say the Tinubu administration has been complacent and accuse the national security adviser of being more focused on political matters.

In a clinic in the city, an aid worker who wanted to remain anonymous watched student nurses roam the hallways. “Everybody has forgotten Maiduguri,” they said.

Meta is facing a second set of lawsuits in Africa over the psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse.

Lawyers are gearing up for court action against a company contracted by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after meeting moderators at a facility in Ghana that is understood to employ about 150 people.

Moderators working for Majorel in Accra claim they have suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia and substance abuse as a direct consequence of the work they do checking extreme content.

The allegedly gruelling conditions endured by workers in Ghana are revealed in a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

It comes after more than 140 Facebook content moderators in Kenya were diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content.

The workers in Kenya were employed by Samasource, an outsourcing company that carries out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa. Majorel, the company at the centre of the allegations in Ghana, is owned by the French multinational Teleperformance.

One man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said he attempted suicide owing to the nature of his work. His claims his contract was subsequently terminated and he has returned his home country.

Facebook and other large social media companies employ armies of content moderators, often based in the poorest parts of the world, to remove posts that breach their community standards and to train AI systems to do the same.

Moderators are required to review distressing and often brutal pictures and videos to establish whether they should be removed from Meta’s platforms. According to workers in Ghana, they have seen videos of a person being skinned alive and a woman being beheaded.

The moderators claim mental health care offered by the firm was unhelpful, was not delivered by medical doctors, and that personal disclosures made by staff about the effects of their work were circulated among managers.

Teleperformance disputed this, saying it employed licensed mental health professionals who are registered with the local regulatory body and hold a master’s degree in psychology, counselling, or another mental health field.

The legal case is being prepared by a UK-based nonprofit, Foxglove. It would be the second case brought by content moderators in Africa, after Samasource workers in Kenya sued in December.

Foxglove said it was “urgently investigating these shocking abuses of workers” with a view to using “every tool at our disposal, including potential legal action” to improve working conditions.

It is working with a Ghanaian firm, Agency Seven Seven, on preparing two possible lawsuits. One would allege psychological harms and could involve a group of moderators, and the other unfair dismissal, involving the moderator from east Africa whose contract was terminated after he attempted suicide.

Foxglove’s co-executive director Martha Dark said: “These are the worst conditions I have seen in six years of working with social media content moderators around the world.

“In Ghana, Meta is displaying nothing short of a complete disregard for the humanity of its key safety workers upon whom all its profits rely – content moderators. They are treated as objects who can be used up, burned out and replaced with no care whatsoever for the permanent damage to their mental and physical wellbeing.”

Dark said basic wages for content moderators in Accra were below living costs, incentivising them to work overtime, pay for which pay is understood to be even lower than normal rates. Moderators face deductions from their pay for failing to meet performance targets, she added.

Contracts seen by the Guardian show that the base wage starts at about 1,300 Ghanaian cedis a month – just over £64. This is supplemented by a system of performance-related bonuses, the upper range of which amounts to about 4,900 cedis (£243) a month, significantly less than the estimated cost of living in Accra.

A Teleperformance spokesperson said that content moderators enjoyed “strong pay and benefits, including monthly pay that is roughly 10 times the country’s minimum wage for domestic moderators, and 16 times the minimum wage for those who have relocated from other countries, when including project allowance, transportation allowance, language premium and more – all of which are automatically paid to the moderator and are not performance-based”.

Foxglove’s researcher Michaela Chen said she had seen photos of moderators’ living quarters, in which they were “crammed five to a flat, two to a room”. She said there appeared to be a culture of secrecy, including surveillance from managers, who follow workers into the toilets during breaks.

This extends to moderators’ work for Meta. She said: “Workers spend all day working on Meta’s platforms, moderating to Meta’s standards and using Meta’s systems, but at the same time, moderators are told constantly: ‘You do not work for Meta,’ and are forbidden from telling anyone they do.”

Teleperformance said that moderators are “offered housing in… one of the most upscale and well-known residential and commercial neighbourhoods in Accra”.

The spokesperson described the housing as ‘safe, with strong security’ and having air conditioning, recreation facilities, including gyms and pools.”

Carla Olympio, a partner at Agency Seven Seven, said she believed a personal injury case could succeed in Ghana’s courts and would set a precedent establishing that worker protections extend to psychological harms as well as physical injury.

“[There is] currently a gap in our laws because they haven’t necessarily caught up with the new developments that cover technology and virtual work,” she said.

Rosa Curling, co-executive Director at Foxglove, said it was seeking for the court to “order immediate changes to the content moderators’ workplace”, including proper safeguards and psychiatric care.

A spokesperson for Teleperformance said: “At TP in Ghana, we take our content moderation work seriously. From the very beginning during the interview process, within the employee contract and through employee training and resiliency testing, we are fully transparent with our prospective moderators regarding the content they might see during their work to help keep the internet safe for our communities. We have robust people management systems and workplace practices, including a robust wellbeing program staffed by fully licensed psychologists to support our content moderators throughout their content moderation journey.

Meta said the companies it works with are “contractually obliged to pay their employees who review content on Facebook and Instagram above the industry standard in the markets they operate”.

The tech company said it takes “the support of content reviewers seriously”, including detailing expectations around counselling, training and other support in contracts with the companies it outsources.

It said all content moderators sign client confidentiality agreements because they are dealing with user information which needs to be protected and for their own safety, but moderators may discuss their jobs with doctors and counsellors, and some aspects with family members.

After Storm Hans battered northern Italy in the runup to Easter, severe weather continued to lash much of the country this week. Since Tuesday, the conditions have triggered potent showers and thunderstormsand yellow and orange weather warnings have been issued.

With winds generally remaining light this week, the greatest concerns surround the risks from intense rainfall, as slow-moving heavy showers can deliver a prolonged downpour to a fairly localised area. The authorities have warned people to avoid high-risk areas such as roads with steep embankments amid a threat of flash flooding and mudslides.

Residents have been advised not to use basements in the event of rainfall and to report any drain blockages in urban areas. Meanwhile, northern regions are on highest alert for flooding after heavy rainfall increased soil saturation and heightened water levels.

The most severe storms have been towards the Adriatic. During torrential showers in the Marche region on Wednesday, multiple locations recorded 10-20mm of rainfall within half an hour, while farther south, in Abruzzo and Molise, there were reports of hail the size of chickpeas.

Although the weekend is expected to bring some respite, thunderstorms are likely to return early next week before drier and calmer conditions at the start of May.

In Kenya, heavy rain in Nairobi on Monday and Tuesday led to at least seven deaths in flash flooding. Authorities said the total could rise as more victims may be discovered downstream.

At least 60,000 people have been affected by the floods, with more than 500 forced from their homes, many within Nairobi’s Mukuru slum region.

Farther west, in Narok County, two people died after being swept away while attempting to cross a swollen river, and eight cows were killed when the tree they were sheltering under was struck by lightning.

Kenya’s primary rainy season, known as masika, occurs in mid-March to late May and is characterised by periods of prolonged steady rainfall interspersed with heavier downpours.

Alongside the risks of injury and damage posed by floods, the rainy season could exacerbate a cholera outbreak in the country, with sewage-contaminated flood water spreading infectious disease.

Hundreds of life-size animal puppets have begun a 20,000km (12,400 mile) journey from central Africa to the Arctic Circle as part of an ambitious project created by the team behind Little Amal, the giant puppet of a Syrian girl that travelled across the world.

The public art initiative called The Herds, which has already visited Kinshasa and Lagos, will travel to 20 cities over four months to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

It is the second major project from The Walk Productions, which introduced Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet, to the world in Gaziantep, near the Turkey-Syria border, in 2021. The award-winning project, co-founded by the Palestinian playwright and director Amir Nizar Zuabi, reached 2 million people in 17 countries as she travelled from Turkey to the UK.

The Herds’ journey began in Kinshasa’s Botanical Gardens on 10 April, kicking off four days of events. It moved on to Lagos, Nigeria, the following week, where up to 5,000 people attended events performed by more than 60 puppeteers.

On Friday the streets of Dakar in Senegal will be filled with more than 40 puppet zebras, wildebeest, monkeys, giraffes and baboons as they run through Médina, one of the busiest neighbourhoods, where they will encounter a creation by Fabrice Monteiro, a Belgium-born artist who lives in Senegal, and is known for his large-scale sculptures. On Saturday the puppets will be part of an event in the fishing village of Ngor.

The first set of animal puppets was created by Ukwanda Puppetry and Designs Art Collective in Cape Town using recycled materials, but in each location local volunteers are taught how to make their own animals using prototypes provided by Ukwanda. The project has already attracted huge interest from people keen to get involved. In Dakar more than 300 artists applied for 80 roles as artists and puppet guides. About 2,000 people will be trained to make the puppets over the duration of the project.

“The idea is that we’re migrating with an ever-evolving, growing group of animals,” Zuabi told the Guardian last year.

Zuabi has spoken of The Herds as a continuation of Little Amal’s journey, which was inspired by refugees, who often cite climate disaster as a trigger for forced migration. The Herds will put the environmental emergency centre stage, and will encourage communities to launch their own events to discuss the significance of the project and get involved in climate activism.

“The idea is to put in front of people that there is an emergency – not with scientific facts, but with emotions,” said The Herds’ Senegal producer, Sarah Desbois.

She expects thousands of people to view the four events being staged over the weekend. “We don’t have a tradition of puppetry in Senegal. As soon as the project started, when people were shown pictures of the puppets, they were going crazy.”

Growing as it moves, The Herds will make its way from Dakar to Morocco, then into Europe, including London and Paris, arriving in the Arctic Circle in early August.

Tanzania’s main opposition party has said at least two of its officials have been arrested on their way to a rally to support the leading government opponent Tundu Lissu, who is due in court to face a treason charge.

Authorities in the east African country have increasingly cracked down on the opposition Chadema party in the run-up to presidential and parliamentary polls in October.

Lissu could face the death penalty over the treason charge. His party has been disqualified from the elections after it refused to sign an electoral code of conduct.

Chadema has accused the president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, of returning to the repressive tactics of her predecessor, John Magufuli.

The Chadema spokesperson, Brenda Rupia, said the party’s deputy chair, John Heche, and secretary general, John Mnyika, were among those detained by police en route to the court in the business capital of Dar es Salaam.

Lissu, 57, was due at Kisutu magistrates court on Thursday, amid growing outrage in the country over his detention. Heche had previously called for demonstrations, and Amnesty International demanded Lissu’s immediate and unconditional release.

Lissu has not been seen since a brief court appearance on 10 April, when he was charged with treason, which has no option of bail, and publication of false information. At the time, a defiant Lissu told supporters: “The treason case is a path to liberation.”

He has been arrested several times in the past but this is the first time Lissu has faced such a serious charge. The politician has led a forceful charge against the government, vowing his party would not participate in polls without significant changes to the electoral system.

Chadema’s refusal to sign an electoral code of conduct prompted its disqualification – but the party has said the rules were designed to “ensure that the ruling party remains in power” and that the ban was unconstitutional.

The president’s party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, won an overwhelming victory in local elections last year but Chadema says the vote was not free or fair since many of its candidates were disqualified.

Chadema has demanded a voting overhaul, including a more independent Electoral Commission and clearer rules to ensure candidates are not removed from ballots.

Lissu warned last year that Chadema would “block the elections through confrontation” unless the system was improved. The opposition’s demands have been long ignored by the ruling party.

A lawyer by training, Lissu entered parliament in 2010 and ran for president in 2020. He was shot 16 times in a 2017 attack that he says was ordered by his political opponents.

After losing the 2020 election to Magufuli, he fled the country but returned in 2023 on a wave of optimism as Hassan relaxed some of her predecessor’s restrictions on the opposition and the media.

Those hopes proved short-lived, with rights groups and western governments increasingly critical of renewed repression, including the arrests of Chadema politicians as well as abductions and murders of opposition figures.

In a statement after Lissu’s detention, Amnesty International condemned a “campaign of repression” by authorities, criticising the “heavy-handed tactics to silence critics”.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s government and the Rwandan-backed M23 group have issued a landmark joint statement saying they have agreed to halt fighting in the east of the country while they work towards a permanent truce.

The surprise announcement follows talks mediated by Qatar. The two sides said they had “agreed to work towards the conclusion of a truce” in the conflict in which the M23 has seized key cities in the violence-battered region.

More than six truces and ceasefires have been agreed and then collapsed again since 2021.

UN experts and several western governments say the M23, which reignited the conflict in 2021, is supported by Rwanda. The Kigali government has denied giving military help. But a US envoy last week called on Rwanda to withdraw from DRC territory.

The latest statement, read on DRC national television and released by an M23 spokesman, said: “Both parties reaffirm their commitment to an immediate cessation of hostilities.” They said the truce would apply “throughout the duration of the talks and until their conclusion”.

Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has been riven by conflict for three decades. The crisis has surged again in recent months with M23’s new advance into the cities of Goma and Bukavu. Thousands have been killed and displaced in the course of the advance, raising fears of a wider regional war.

DRC’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, has long refused to hold direct talks with M23 or their political alliance, accusing them of working for Rwanda.

Qatar caused a diplomatic surprise with its mediation effort. The negotiations started earlier in April. In early March, Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, held surprise meetings in Doha and later expressed their support for a ceasefire.

Qatari foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari welcomed the joint statement by the DRC government and M23. The Gulf state urged the parties to work “towards an agreement that aligns with the aspirations of the Congolese people for peace and development”, he said.

A source with knowledge of the meetings told AFP the talks in Doha had been “constructive”.

“Both parties are now preparing for a deeper round of discussions to ... build the foundations for a comprehensive political settlement,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. “Both sides are expected to return to Doha for further talks in the coming weeks.”

Qatar has signed several economic cooperation accords with Rwanda and DRC, including to invest more than $1bn in a new airport near Kigali.

Rwanda has never acknowledged a military presence in the DRC, but frequently highlights its security concerns on the border. It has demanded the eradication of ethnic Hutu militias in the DRC founded by Rwandan officials linked to the 1994 Rwanda genocide.