Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 5 August

Dispatches: Sierra Leone helped an alleged blood diamond and arms supplier elude justice today. The victims of the country's long civil war deserve justice and Ibrahim Bah, an alleged arms dealer to the notoriously brutal Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, was supposed to face the music in court. Instead, President Ernest Bai Koroma deported him. In Syria, ballistic missiles fired by the Syrian military are hitting populated areas, causing large numbers of civilian deaths. Human Rights Watch has released a new investigation...
Dispatches: In this age of austerity, the International Criminal Court's big budget ask signals fresh thinking.

Iran has sworn in a new president, but can Hassan Rouhani now make good on his promises to expand personal freedoms and respect human rights?

In Egypt, the stand-off between the interim government and supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsy continues. Many fear another bloodbath if the authorities follow through on their threats to disperse sit-ins in Cairo.
In Thailand, a proposed amnesty law would let both soldiers and militants responsible for deaths during the 2010 upheaval off the hook. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Kenneth Roth writes that the al-Qaeda threat to the United States, while still real, no longer meets the standards that define an armed conflict under international law.