Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 11 June 2015

Saudi authorities could resume lashing the liberal activist and blogger Raif Badawi as early as tomorrow. Badawi received the first 50 lashes of the 1,000 he'd been sentenced to back in January, but an international outcry stoppped further flogging. Yet his sentence was upheld earlier this week and it's now feared his lashing could resume tomorrow. In Russia, a quasi-official Chechen media outlet has issued apparent death threats against a veteran investigative journalist. The Kenyan government should stop harassing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country’s coastal area, a coalition of rights groups said today. A delegation from the International Criminal Court at The Hague is due to arrive in Israel later this month as part of a preliminary examination into whether war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in the occupied Palestinian territories, it's being reported. The Burmese government has denied that the persecution of its Rohingya Muslim population is behind south-east Asia's migrant crisis, and blamed the phenomenon of boat people on human trafficking gangs instead. One year into President Sisi's rule of Egypt, there are growing concerns about a surge in forced disappearances, as well as a litany of other abuses under his leadership. It was possibly the worst massacre so far by Boko Haram during its six-year reign of terror in north-eastern Nigeria. And now Human Rights Watch has documented the terrible events at Baga in painstaking detail. India’s growing annoyance with foreign-funded NGOs is not a mark of strength, but of weakness, it's being argued.