Authorities in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, have begun a vicious crackdown on the city’s LGBT community, according to activists in the country. Reports suggest that over the past 10 days dozens of gay and trans people have been arrested. One person the Guardian contacted said he had been beaten in police custody.

Homosexuality is legal in the oil-rich, post-Soviet country, but a survey released last year by a rights organisation ranked Azerbaijan as the worst of 49 European countries in which to be gay. “There have been previous crackdowns on LGBT people, but this one is much bigger, with systematic and widespread raids,” said Samed Rahimli, a Baku-based lawyer who is helping coordinate legal defences for those who have been detained.

Rahimli said he was aware of 60 cases of LGBT people who had been either sentenced to 20 days’ imprisonment or fined as part of the recent crackdown. Those currently in jail were charged with resisting police orders. “This is a common charge used in Azerbaijan for arbitrary arrests.” He said many more people could have been caught up in the sweep but not formally charged.(theguardian)…[+]

The US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has made a second dramatic intervention in US Middle East policy, suggesting that only 2% of the West Bank is occupied by Israel and that the international community always intended for Israel to keep some of the land it seized in 1967 during the six-day war.

The comments, in an interview with the news channel Israeli Walla, came a day after rightwing Israeli politicians celebrated 50 years of Israeli settlement-building, prompting condemnation by Palestinian officials. “I think the settlements are part of Israel,” Friedman said, comments that seem at odds with decades of US foreign policy.

“I think that was always the expectation when resolution 242 was adopted in 1967,” he said, referring to the UN security council resolution made at the end of the six-day war, when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Friedman, a former personal lawyer of Donald Trump who had no experience in diplomacy before his appointment, was regarded as being a strong supporter of Jewish settlement before he was named as ambassador.(theguardian)…[+]

UN human rights experts have warned the Spanish authorities that their “worrying” efforts to halt Catalonia’s independence referendum appear to violate fundamental individual rights as well as stifle debate “at a critical moment for Spain’s democracy”.The intervention by two specialists working for the UN Human Rights Council comes three days before Catalans are due to vote in a poll declared illegal by both the Spanish government and the country’s constitutional court. In a statement, David Kaye and Alfred de Zayas singled out the recent arrests of 14 Catalan officials, the blocking of referendum websites and the possibility that protest organisers could be charged with sedition.

“Regardless of the lawfulness of the referendum, the Spanish authorities have a responsibility to respect those rights that are essential to democratic societies,” the experts said.  “The measures we are witnessing are worrying because they appear to violate fundamental individual rights, cutting off public information and the possibility of debate at a critical moment for Spain’s democracy.”

David Kaye, special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and De Zayas, an independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, also expressed reservations over the Spanish government’s decision to deploy thousands of extra police officers to Catalonia.(theguardian)…[+]