Amid constant opposition and concerns by international communities and rights defenders on safety grounds, Bangladesh on Saturday relocated the fourth batch of Rohingya refugees to a remote island in its southern sea, according to official sources.

A total of 1,463 members of the persecuted community began the journey to the Bhasan Char island from the country’s main port city Chattogram by naval ships.

“All concrete houses are fully prepared to house the new arrivals. Actually, we are ready to resettle all 100,000 Rohingya at the cluster houses on the island as per the government’s initiatives,” Commodore Abdullah Al Mamun Chowdhury, director of the Rohingya resettlement project, told Anadolu Agency.

With the new batch, the total number of Rohingya on the remote island stands at around 7,000 -- including 5,224 from previous three batches and 306 stranded Rohingya who shifted to the island nearly eight months ago after being rescued in the sea by the Bangladesh Navy.

Spending over $350 million, the Bangladeshi government has constructed 1,400 big cluster houses four feet above the ground with concrete blocks, along with 120 multi-story cyclone shelters on the island to relocate 100,000 Rohingya from the main camps in the southern district of Cox’s Bazar.

Bangladeshi authorities have defended the move as essential to ensure better living conditions for the persecuted people in a separate location and improve the packed camps in Cox’s Bazar.

The world’s biggest refugee settlements in Bangladesh’s main tourist hub Cox’s Bazar are currently housing more than 1.1 million Rohingya, most of whom fled the August 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

In the guise of curbing militants, the Myanmar army launched a brutal crackdown on Rohingya civilians in Rakhine, which has been called a textbook example of ethnic cleansing by the UN and a genocide case at the top UN court is still under trial.

“We are hopeful that the relocation of 100,000 Rohingya to the island will be completed within a short time as they [Rohingya] are responding to the move spontaneously,” Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner Shah Rezwan Hayat told Anadolu Agency.

Meanwhile, Chowdhury said the education program committed by the government for Rohingya children on the island has started with the help of some local NGOs.

“Currently 150 Rohingya children are being educated at the island’s education centers,” he said, adding that all 120 cyclone shelters are supposed to be used as learning centers or schools throughout the whole year, except the days of natural disasters, in accordance with the project planning.

International communities including the UN, however, have been opposing the move since the very beginning and demanding the relocation process to be halted until a full-fledged feasibility study is done over the habitability and safety of the island.

The silty island in the Bay of Bengal -- located around 50 kilometers (31 miles) off Bangladesh’s southwestern coast and nearly 193 km (120 mi) south of the capital Dhaka -- came into existence only two decades ago and is reportedly prone to natural disasters.

Before the construction of Rohingya resettlements, there was no human habitation on the island, popularly known as a floating island./aa

The Turkish Coast Guard on Saturday rescued at least 48 asylum seekers whose boats were pushed by Greek coastal authorities into Turkish waters in the Aegean Sea, according to security sources.

A coast guard team was dispatched to an area off Cesme in the western Izmir province after they learned a group of asylum seekers was stranded on a dinghy, said a source, who asked not to be named due to restrictions on speaking to the media.

A total of 19 asylum seekers were brought ashore, the source added.

Separately, coast guards rescued 29 asylum seekers on a dinghy in the Dikili district after they asked for help.

They were later transferred to the provincial migration office.

Turkey has been a key transit point for asylum seekers who want to cross into Europe to start new lives, especially those fleeing war and persecution.

Turkey hosts nearly 4 million Syrians, more than any other country in the world./aa

World Health Organization (WHO) experts investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic on Saturday visited a Wuhan hospital that received some of the first confirmed COVID-19 cases.

It is the investigating team's second full day of work after they emerged from a 14-day quarantine.

Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital was one of the city’s first to deal with patients in early 2020 suffering from a then-unknown virus and is a key part of the epidemiological history of the disease.

“Just back from visit at Jinyintan hospital, that specialized in infectious diseases and was designated for treatment of the first cases in Wuhan," Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said in a post on Twitter. “Stories quite similar to what I have heard from our ICU doctors.”

Zoologist Peter Daszak of the U.S. group EcoHealth Alliance, who is a member of the team, said in a tweet that the visit was an “important opportunity to talk directly” with medics who were fighting the virus at the critical time.

The team’s first face-to-face meetings with Chinese scientists took place on Friday, before the experts who specialize in animal health, virology, food safety and epidemiology visited another early site of the outbreak, the Hubei Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital.

The Geneva-based WHO said late Thursday on Twitter that its team plans to visit hospitals, markets like the Huanan Seafood Market that was linked to many of the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and laboratories at facilities including the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

“All hypotheses are on the table as the team follows the science in their work to understand the origins of the COVID19 virus,” WHO tweeted. It said the team had already requested “detailed underlying data” and planned to speak with early responders and some of the first patients.

The mission has become politically charged, as China seeks to shape the narrative and avoid blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak.

A single visit by scientists is unlikely to confirm the virus’s origins. Pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir is typically an exhaustive endeavor that takes years of research including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.

One possibility is that a wildlife poacher might have passed the virus to traders who carried it to Wuhan. The Chinese government has promoted theories, with little evidence, that the outbreak might have started with imports of frozen seafood tainted with the virus, a notion roundly rejected by international scientists and agencies.

A possible focus for investigators is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One of China’s top virus research labs, it built an archive of genetic information about bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

As the outbreak became apparent the city of Wuhan announced the world's first coronavirus lockdown in late January last year.

Life has largely returned to normal in the city of 11 million, even as the rest of the world grapples with the spread of the virus’s more contagious variants. Efforts to vaccinate people for COVID-19 have been frustrated by disarray and limited supplies in some places. The scourge has killed more than 2 million people worldwide.

More than 200,000 people have fled fighting in the Central African Republic (CAR) since violence erupted over a December election result, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday, with nearly half crossing into the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The CAR army, backed by UN, Russian and Rwandan troops, has been battling rebels seeking to overturn a December 27 vote in which President Faustin-Archange Touadera was declared the winner.

“Refugees have told UNHCR that they fled in panic when they heard gun shots, leaving their belongings behind,” spokesperson Boris Cheshirkov told journalists in Geneva.

The nation of nearly five million people, larger than mainland France, Belgium and Luxembourg combined and rich in diamonds, timber and gold, has struggled to find stability since a 2013 rebellion ousted former president Francois Bozize.

The current fighting between a coalition of militias on the one side and the national army and its backers on the other was sparked by a Constitutional Court decision to bar Bozize's candidacy in the December 27 presidential election.

Former prime minister Martin Ziguele, who came third in the December 27 election, said on Friday there was fighting across the country every day, preventing movement between towns, and pushing more people to flee.

“Everyone is focused on the main transport route between the capital and eastern Cameroon for supplies, but inside the country, there is no movement,” Ziguele told Reuters by phone from Bangui.

“I cannot leave Bangui and go 90km (60 miles) without a heavily-armed army escort. Imagine then the population. Add the curfew and the state of emergency, it is really an apocalyptic situation,” Ziguele said.

In a statement on Friday, the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, a regional body of 12 member states, called for a ceasefire and urged armed groups to “disengage from the encirclement of Bangui” and allow people and goods to move freely.

The body will also ask the United Nations Security Council to lift an arms embargo imposed on CAR that has restricted the flow of weapons to the army since 2013.

SEX FOR FOOD

About 92,000 refugees have reached DRC and more than 13,000 have crossed into Cameroon, Chad and the Republic of Congo. The rest are displaced inside the Central African Republic, the UNHCR said.

Ongoing attacks have hampered humanitarian access, the main road used to bring supplies has been forced to shut inside the country, and many are now facing “dire conditions”, UNHCR's Cheshirkov said.

Some of the displaced are so desperate they have agreed to sex in return for food, he added. Malaria, respiratory tract infections, and diarrhoea have become common.

He also voiced concern about the reported presence of armed groups in the Batangafo and Bria camps for the displaced.

“Those armed groups are trying in some cases to restrict movements and in some cases forcibly recruit. So this is a very concerning situation,” he told the briefing.

Ziguele said that while a substantial increase in peacekeepers, as requested by the UN envoy in Bangui, was welcomed, a dialogue between all parties was urgently needed.

“A military surge is not the only solution to tackle the security, humanitarian and economic crisis that is threatening to put one of the world's least developed countries into a complete coma,” he said.

The imminent execution in Iran of a man who was allegedly tortured into confessing that he belonged to a jihadist group must be stopped, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Friday.

The appeal, which came a day before Javid Dehghan was due to be put to death, follows a series of “at least 28” executions in December, including people from ethnic minorities, such as the Baluchi minority, to which Mr. Dehghan belongs. OHCHR strongly-condemned the spate of State-sanctioned killings.

OHCHR urged the Iranian authorities to review Mr. Dehghan’s case in line with human rights law, citing “serious fair trial violations”.

It noted that he had been arrested in May 2017 and sentenced to death for “taking up arms to take lives or property and to create fear”.

Solitary confinement, torture

After being held in solitary confinement for 15 months and tortured, the UN rights office said that Mr. Dehghan confessed – and later retracted – being a member of a jihadist group and that he had fatally shot two Revolutionary Guards officials.

Despite requests for appeal, his case was not subject to review, said OHCHR. In December 2020, Mr. Dehghan’s lawyer submitted a request for a review based on flaws during the process leading up to Dehghan’s conviction.

The appeal was rejected by Iran’s Supreme Court and the lawyer was notified four days ago. While preparing a new request for retrial, the lawyer was informed that the authorities had scheduled the execution for 30 January, and had informed the family to make their last visit.

Crackdown on minorities

The development follows what OHCHR has described as a crackdown on religious minorities in Iran since mid-December 2020.

This has included a series of executions of members of ethnic and religious minority groups – in particular Kurdish, Ahwazi Arab and Baluch communities, said OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani.

Highlighting the disproportionate nature of the punishments, Ms. Shamdasani noted that “a large number of the executions are based on charges that do not amount to ‘most serious crimes’, including drug and national security charges, and following serious shortcomings of fair trial and due process rights”./ un.org

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has won Sweden's Olof Palme human rights prize for 2020.

Organisers said the movement was honoured for promoting "peaceful civil disobedience against police brutality and racial violence" across the globe.

They noted that about 20 million people had taken part in Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the US alone, along with millions more around the world.

An online prize-giving ceremony is due to take place in Stockholm on Saturday.

The $100,000 (£73,000) annual prize commemorates Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister and prominent human rights advocate who was assassinated in Stockholm in 1986.

Founded in the US in 2013, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was became an international slogan last year following several high-profile cases of police brutality against African-Americans.

Protests that followed the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others saw chapters of Black Lives Matter spread across the US and around the world.

"This illustrates that racism and racist violence is not just a problem in American society, but a global problem," prize organisers said.

They said the foundation had "in a unique way exposed the hardship, pain, and wrath of the African-American minority at not being valued equal to people of a different colour".

A Norwegian MP, Petter Eide, has nominated the BLM foundation for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

In his nomination papers, Mr Eide said the movement had become an "important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice".