Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 4 July 2014

With yet another round of deadly clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma this week, expanding anti-Muslim political activism is cause for alarm. Local boycotts against Muslim-owned businesses throughout the country have accompanied calls on the government to enact restrictive laws on inter-faith marriage, religious conversions, polygamy and family planning. Burma continues to receive Western praise for its reforms, but Naypyidaw has done little to end impunity and human rights violations.

In Iraq, restrictive new media guidelines "force the media to stop reporting and become a government public relations appendage". Mandating pro-government coverage, the new rules demand that media outlets avoid making information about insurgent forces public and require them to report on government forces only in favorable terms.  A new counterterrorism law in Pakistan threatens basic rights and freedoms in violation of the country’s international legal obligations, It has emerged that the UK government devised plans to train and equip a 100,000-strong Syrian rebel army two years ago. The revelations come as Washington is deliberating a similar new $500m proposal for opposition forces and rekindle debates over whether the world has responded to the Syria crisis with too little too late or whether the dangers of increased intervention outweigh the possible benefits. Heads of state at an African Union summit voted to grant themselves immunity for mass atrocity crimes by stripping the new African court of justice and human rights of the power to prosecute them. Some leaders in Africa, particularly those currently the subject of cases in The Hague, have been criticizing the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its alleged anti-African bias, though their detractors will say this new move only confirms their ambition to avoid accountability for the most grievous of crimes.