The UK government should not rely on unreliable "diplomatic assurances" against torture to deport national security suspects to Ethiopia.

Human Rights Watch writes to Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Rt Hon David Miliband, on the consequences of the UK and Ethiopian governments signing the Memorandum of Understanding which would do little to curb acts of torture in Ethiopia.

Who rules Iraq? If you ask Baghdad officials or the Obama administration's proconsuls, they will tell you: a democratically elected Iraqi government, a triumphant product of the "purple revolution" that reflects the will of Iraq's people. If you ask Mashal, a shopkeeper from Baghdad's al-Sha'ab neighbourhood, he has a different answer.

With the visit of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to Rome this week, Italy and Libya are celebrating their recently ratified Friendship Treaty. But this pact, which has already resulted in joint naval patrols that run roughshod over refugee and migrant rights - as Tana de Zulueta commented - is hardly cause for celebration.

Legislation to allow the government to hold secret investigations into suspicious deaths involving state agents would undermine accountability and breach human rights law.

We write to express concern over shortcomings in the International Criminal Court Act (ICCA) of 2001, particularly with respect to jurisdiction over the crime of genocide. We urge the government of the United Kingdom to amend the ICCA in order to ensure that the world's worst crimes, including crimes of genocide, may be prosecuted in UK domestic courts and to prevent the UK from becoming a refuge for the perpetrators of these heinous crimes.

Eritrea has avoided international attention in recent years in ways that may have protected the Red Sea country's rulers from proper scrutiny but benefit no one else. Even those who recall that the continent's youngest state gained its unlikely independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a bloody thirty-year struggle may be shocked to hear that the optimistic nationalism of the 1990s has been dissolved under President Isaias Afewerki into a despairing void, causing thousands of Eritreans to flee the country that they fought so hard to establish.

The Israeli government and its supporters have lashed out at the report of the UN board of inquiry into Israeli attacks on UN installations during Israel's latest offensive in Gaza.