Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 12 February 2015

Reports from peace talks in Minsk this morning suggest leaders have agreed a ceasefire deal for eastern Ukraine to start on Saturday. Some details remain unclear at the moment, but one thing known for certain is that on the ground, fighting continues, and the civilian death toll is rising. More grim details are emerging about the latest mass drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean. Rights groups say the European Union should step up its operations to rescue migrants at sea. Sudanese army forces raped more than 200 women and girls in an organized attack on the north Darfur town of Tabit in October 2014, Human Rights Watch said. The group called on the United Nations and African Union to take urgent steps to protect civilians in the town from further abuses. While some are proposing a delay in the UN's report into grave abuses in Sri Lanka's civil war to give the new government time, rights groups have rejected the idea. Journalist Peter Greste is free, his Al Jazeera colleagues, Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy, are not. A retrial began in Egypt today. Twenty-two years ago, residents of Kabul’s Afshar district awoke to the sound of rockets launched at them from a nearby mountainside. 11 February 1993 marked the bloody dawn of the Afshar campaign, one of the worst mass atrocities of Afghanistan’s civil war of the early 1990s.