Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said Thai authorities are wrongfully prosecuting online news outlets and social media users for reporting an alleged rape case on the island.

“Thai police appear to be using computer-related crime charges against anyone who questions their shoddy investigation of the Koh Tao island rape case,” said Adams. “The authorities should immediately drop these bogus charges.”

Police have arrested 12 Facebook users from across Thailand under the Computer Crime Act for sharing “false and groundless” information about the alleged rape of a 19yearold British tourist in June.

As well as the 12 suspects already in police custody, two others are still at large; one is Pramuk Anantasin, administrator of CSI LA facebook page and Suzanne Emery, British publisher of the online newspaper and Facebook page Samui Times.

They criticised the police investigation on the alleged rape, saying it reached the conclusion too quickly that no rape happened.

Thai police have repeatedly defended the arrests and the warrants, saying the suspects were accused of sharing “false and groundless information” from Facebook pages.

Adams said that police have never interviewed the alleged victim or conducted a forensic examination of evidence, yet they announced that no rape occurred.

The British teenager who claimed to have been raped returned home in early July and alerted her mother about the allegation. The mother said her daughter tried to file the rape claim with police on nearby Koh Pangan but police refused to accept the complaint. Koh Pangan police have denied the claim, saying the teenager wanted to file a complaint only about the robbery of her belongings for an insurance claim.

Regional lawmakers today welcomed the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which ruled that it could exercise jurisdiction over the alleged crime of deportation of the Rohingya population, despite Myanmar not being a party to the Rome Statute.

“This is a milestone decision and a step forward towards accountability for the alleged atrocity crimes against the Rohingya population,” said Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) Chair Charles Santiago, a member of the Malaysian Parliament.

Read also : ICC says can rule on Rohingya deportations from Myanmar

Santiago said this ruling, however, is for now just on the jurisdiction to investigate around the alleged crime of deportation and we must be cautious in our optimism.

It remains imperative that we continue to seek other international justice mechanisms, as well as the United Nations Security Council referral of Myanmar to the ICC for the wide array of atrocity crimes its leaders have been accused, including genocide and other crimes against humanity.

“This doesn’t mean the international community can take our collective foot off the pedal,”Santiago said in a statement UNB received from Jakarta.

On Thursday, the ICC found that, while the underlying “coercive acts” under the alleged crime against humanity of deportation of Rohingya took place in a State not party to the Rome Statute, the Court nevertheless could assert jurisdiction as an element of the crime had also occurred on the territory of a State party to the Statute -in this case, Bangladesh.

The Court also concluded that such jurisdiction extended to other crimes of humanity under the Rome Statute, particularly those on the persecution of a group and other inhumane acts.

“The ICC now has the opportunity to initiate a full investigation. This means bringing those responsible for the alleged human rights violations to account and possibly putting an end to the longstanding discrimination and injustices this community has faced in Myanmar,” said APHR Board Member Eva Kusuma Sundari, a member of the House of Representatives of Indonesia.

Sundari said this will undoubtedly bring some much-needed hope and optimism for the more than one million Rohingya who have suffered under decades of brutal tyranny in Myanmar.

“We look forward to the recommendations of the preliminary examination concerning the crimes allegedly committed against the Rohingya people and hope for a full investigation and trial of those accountable for all alleged crimes under the jurisdiction of the ICC,” Sundari said.

In the meantime, the international community, including ASEAN states, must continue pushing for other potential mechanisms that could bring accountability and justice for all those victims of crimes across Myanmar and ensure those displaced can return, APHR said.

“More than one million Rohingya have been forced from their homes over decades of discrimination and violence. International accountability is an important step towards justice but must be pursued alongside other efforts within Myanmar to ensure that those refugees and displaced persons can return home in a voluntary and dignified manner with assurances for their safety and full access to rights as citizens of Myanmar,” Sundari said.

In August, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found patterns of gross human rights violations committed in Rakhine, Kachin, and Shan States, and called for the investigation and prosecution of Myanmar’s top military generals.

The Myanmar government has since continued to deny such allegations and have refused to accept the findings of the mission.

It is due to deliver its full report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on September 18.

Some 700,000 people from the stateless Muslim minority have fled Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state into neighbouring Bangladesh since August last year to escape a bloody military crackdown.

The ICC’s “pre-trial chamber… decided by majority the court may exercise jurisdiction over the alleged deportations of the Rohingya people from Myanmar to Bangladesh”, the Hague-based tribunal said in a statement.

The ruling offers “a glimmer of hope for justice” for Rohingyas who “continue to suffer in Bangladesh as a result of this serious crime,” Adilur Rahman Khan, vice-president of the International Federation for Human Rights, said in a statement.

The Myanmar government on Thursday declined to comment on the announcement when contacted by AFP.

The move comes days after UN investigators called for an international investigation and prosecution of Myanmar’s army chief and five other top military commanders for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Rohingya.

The violence has left a trail of torched villages in its wake, amid allegations of murder and rape at the hands of troops and vigilantes.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) has said that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed between August and September last year in an army crackdown the UN has called “ethnic cleansing” containing “elements of genocide”.

‘Cross-border shooting’

In an unprecedented move in April, the ICC’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked judges to rule whether she can investigate the deportations as a crime against humanity.

It is a legally complicated request, as Myanmar is not a signatory and member of the Rome Statute which underpins the ICC.

The Southeast Asian nation voiced “serious concern” over the prosecutor’s move, saying that the ICC’s charter in fact did not state that it had jurisdiction to investigate a country that had not signed up to the Rome Statute that governs the court.

Bangladesh, however, is a signatory and the judges said that because the deportations involve a cross-border crime, that gives the court jurisdiction to investigate the plight of the Rohingya.

Bensouda had likened deportation to “a cross-border shooting”, arguing the crime “is not completed until the bullet (fired in one state) strikes and kills the victim (standing in another state)”.

The judge’s ruling follows the jailing of two Reuters journalists for seven years on Monday accused of breaching Myanmar’s state secrets law while reporting on a Rohingya massacre.

Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s civilian leader, has faced criticism for remaining silent on the jailings.

On Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he would host talks at the UN over the allegations of genocide, warning the perpetrators must be brought to justice.

‘Justice’

Thursday’s ruling now leaves the path open for the prosecutor to announce the formal opening of a preliminary investigation into the matter.

That gives Bensouda a chance to see if there is enough evidence to open a full-blown probe, which could eventually lead to a trial.

The ICC judges said that “such a preliminary investigation must be concluded within a reasonable time”.

But the road to a tribunal will be long and complex, with China likely try to thwart any prosecution of its ally at the world’s only permanent war crimes court.

Set up in 2002 in The Hague, the ICC acts to prosecute the worst abuses including genocide in places where national courts are unwilling or unable to act.

Some of its biggest successes have been over war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the destruction of religious Muslim shrines in Timbuktu in Mali.

The Myanmar army in the mainly Buddhist nation has denied any allegations, saying its campaign has been a legitimate response to Rohingya militant attacks last year that killed about a dozen border guard police.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees staged protests 10 days ago to mark the first anniversary of the flight from Myanmar demanding “justice”.

An investigation into the Rohingya deportations would be the third for the ICC in Asia, which is already tentatively probing alleged crimes committed during the Philippines’ so-called “war on drugs campaign” and the conflict in Afghanistan.

Tommy Koh, ambassador-at-large in the Singapore foreign ministry, made the comments on Facebook in response to a post about Thursday’s historic ruling, which followed a decades-long campaign against the law in the South Asian nation.

“I would encourage our gay community to bring a class action to challenge the constitutionality of Section 377A,” Koh said, referring to the law which criminalises sex between men.

Responding to a comment that previous petitions to strike down the law were unsuccessful, Singapore’s former US ambassador and envoy to the United Nations said: “Try again.”

While Singapore boasts a modern and vibrant culture, attitudes towards homosexuality remain conservative. Sex between men remains technically illegal under a law dating back to British colonial rule, although the statute is rarely enforced.

Despite the challenges, support for gay rights has been growing in recent years in the city-state of 5.6 million. Huge crowds attended the 10th anniversary of Singapore’s annual Pink Dot gay rights rally in July.

Pink Dot, Singapore’s leading gay rights group, said the Indian ruling showed attitudes towards homosexuals were “positively changing in Asia” and called on parliament to decriminalise gay sex.

In 2014, Singapore’s highest court dismissed a constitutional challenge to the law and said it was up to parliament to repeal it.

Singapore Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said the government was caught in between a majority of Singaporeans opposing the repeal of the law and a “growing minority” who want it abolished.

“Really I think society has to decide which direction it wants to go,” he added. “The laws will have to keep pace with the changes in society.”

Taking off from the cat cafes already popular in the Cambodian capital, Chea Raty launched his business to revamp the skin-crawling reputation of lizards and snakes and convince haters that they are simply misunderstood.

The walls of his cafe are lined with lit-up glass tanks containing snakes of various lengths and colours, while a bright macaw screeches in the corner.

There’s no entry fee, so visitors can order a coffee and request a sit-down with a serpentine friend from one of the tanks. Business is still slow-going due to the common fears of snakes and lizards.

But women, Chea Raty says, are providing an unexpected boost. “They put the pythons around their neck, take selfies, and they are happy.”

Kang made the remarks at a lecture two days after Seoul presidential envoys’ one-day trip to the North, where they nailed down the date of the Pyongyang summit — Sept. 18-20 — and reconfirmed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s commitment to denuclearization.

“This dramatic period of time is progressing with the leaders’ determination for peace on the Korean Peninsula,” the minister said during a lecture at Woosuk University in the southeastern county of Wanju.

Pointing to possible challenges on a path toward peace, Kang said the North’s nuclear disarmament will take patience and time.

“Inter-Korean tension reduction, cross-border policy cooperation, multilateral talks for the establishment of a peace regime and an agreement on complete denuclearization for a peninsula free from nuclear weapons,” she said. “All these will be a long-term task that requires much patience and effort.”

The special envoys’ trip was arranged amid a perceived impasse in negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.

Washington has demanded that the communist state take tangible denuclearization steps, such as a full declaration of its nuclear and missile stockpiles. But Pyongyang wants the U.S. to agree first on a declaration of a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War.

This month’s inter-Korean summit is expected to be a test of South Korean President Moon’s diplomacy to break the diplomatic deadlock, observers said.

During the lecture, the foreign minister noted the need for young people’s support for ongoing peace efforts.

“There will be more work for the new generation of leaders to do for peace on the peninsula that the world has been carefully watching,” she said.

Around 22 people are still unaccounted for in the small northern countryside town of Atsuma, where a cluster of dwellings were wrecked when a hillside collapsed with the force of the 6.6-magnitude quake, causing deep brown scars in the landscape.

“We’ve heard there are people still stuck under the mud, so we’ve been working around the clock but it’s been difficult to rescue them,” a Self-Defense Forces serviceman in Atsuma told public broadcaster NHK.

“We will take measures to find them quickly.”

An elderly woman in Atsuma told NHK: “My relative is still buried under the mud and has not been found yet, so I couldn’t sleep at all last night. There were also several aftershocks so it was a restless night.”

Around 1.6 million households in the sparsely populated northern island of Hokkaido were still without power after the quake damaged a thermal plant supplying electricity to the region.

Industry minister Hiroshige Seko said that number should be reduced to 550,000 households on Friday.

“It will take about a week” before the largest thermal power plant recovers, “so during that period, we are sending power-generating vehicles to hospitals,” Seko told reporters.

He urged citizens to conserve energy by having fewer lights on in shops and restaurants and “for example family members staying together in one room”.

Some 22,000 rescue workers including troops called up from the Self-Defense Forces handed out emergency water supplies and long lines formed at petrol stations and supermarkets, as people stocked up fearing further quakes.

“Please give your sympathy to people who spent a dark night in fear, and do everything you can to restore electricity as soon as possible,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a cabinet meeting to discuss the quake.

The earthquake, which scored the maximum on a Japanese scale measuring the power of a quake’s shaking, also collapsed a handful of houses and walls in the main city of Sapporo.

However, considering the strength of the quake, the death toll was relatively light, with the majority of victims coming from the landslide in Atsuma.

‘Pay attention’

Transport services were gradually coming back on line with bullet trains resuming operations late Friday morning and the main airport in Sapporo operating a partial service after cancelling all flights the day before.

But a football friendly between Japan and Chile in Sapporo planned on Friday was scrapped due to the transport and power chaos in Hokkaido.

The quake was the latest in a string of natural disasters to batter the country.

Western parts of the country are still recovering from the most powerful typhoon to strike Japan in a quarter of a century, which claimed 11 lives and shut down the main regional airport.

And officials warned of the danger of fresh quakes.

“Large quakes often occur, especially within two to three days (of a big one),” said Toshiyuki Matsumori, in charge of monitoring earthquakes and tsunamis at the meteorological agency.

The risk of housing collapses and landslides had increased, he said, urging residents “to pay full attention to seismic activity and rainfall and not to go into dangerous areas”.

Japan sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire” where many of the world’s earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are recorded.

In June, a deadly tremor rocked the Osaka region, killing five people and injuring over 350.

On March 11, 2011, a devastating 9.0-magnitude quake struck under the Pacific Ocean, and the resulting tsunami caused widespread damage and claimed thousands of lives.

The White House has been convulsed by a fevered hunt for the senior official who declared, in an unsigned article for The New York Times published Wednesday, that “unsung heroes” were quietly working within the administration to frustrate the president’s “worst inclinations.”

“Nobody knows who the hell he is, or she,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Billings, Montana, adding: “Unidentified deep state operatives who defy voters to push their secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself.”

Invoking national security concerns, Trump said the paper should publish the official’s name, before encouraging reporters to investigate the matter. “That would be a good scoop!” he said.

On the internet and in Washington, a guessing game has raged over who the author might be, prompting nearly every cabinet-ranked member of the government to deny it was them.

Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats were among those who issued denials.

“The Vice President puts his name on his Op-eds. The @nytimes should be ashamed and so should the person who wrote the false, illogical, and gutless op-ed,” Pence’s spokesman Jarrod Agen wrote on Twitter.

“Our office is above such amateur acts.”

The manifesto followed the release of excerpts from a bombshell book by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who portrayed Trump’s White House as an out-of-control “crazytown.”

Trump responded with a furious volley of tweets that asked if the author had committed treason while First Lady Melania Trump condemned the decision to publish.

“To the writer of the op-ed — you are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions,” she said.

Firestorm

The Woodward book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” reported that senior aides lifted documents from the Oval Office desk to keep the president from acting on his impulses, reinforcing the assertions in the Times article.

The firestorm caught up with Mattis and Pompeo in New Delhi, where the Secretary of State denounced the Times’ decision to publish as “sad” and “disturbing.”

“I come from a place where if you’re not in a position to execute the commander’s intent, you have a singular option, that is to leave,” he said.

Both men denied involvement, while Coats, who as intelligence chief has at times been publicly at odds with Trump, said in a statement speculation that he or his deputy had written the op-ed were “patently false.”

When asked if she wrote it, UN envoy Nikki Haley responded with a curt “no” on her way to a Security Council meeting.

James Dao, who runs the Times op-ed page, told CNN he received the article several days ago through an intermediary, but had spoken directly with its author.

Eye-opening

In one eye-opening passage, the writer says cabinet members initially considered invoking the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution, which provides for the president’s removal if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

They decided against the move, fearing a constitutional crisis, but Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren took to the airwaves on Thursday to revive the idea.

“If senior administration officials think the president of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Warren told CNN.

Trump meanwhile has called for the article’s author to be unmasked.

“Are the investigative ‘journalists’ of the New York Times going to investigate themselves – who is the anonymous letter writer?,” he tweeted ahead of a rally in Montana.

The Times acknowledged the “rare step” of publishing an anonymous editorial but said the official’s job would be jeopardized if they were identified.

The piece described a “two-track” presidency in which Trump says one thing and his staff consciously does another, citing the president’s alleged preference “for autocrats and dictators.”

“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality,” the official said, denouncing Trump’s “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” leadership style.

However, it ordered the disputing parties to mediate on Thursday before the court proceeds with legal procedures.

The Inclusive Development International (IDI) said on Wednesday that the Thai company, Mitr Phol’s subsidiaries, including Angkor Sugar Company, had forcibly displaced over 7,000 Cambodian farming families between 2008 and 2009.

About 9,430ha of farmland were affected in the takeover by the Thai company.

David Pred, IDI’s executive director, said international corporations – including Nestle, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Mars – were the biggest buyers of Mitr Phol’s products.

He said the reputation of these companies was on the line due to the land dispute.

“The Cambodian victims have been waiting for justice for a decade – if Mitr Phol doesn’t deliver it through these mediations, the brands should immediately cut their supply contracts with the company.

“Failing to do so after so many years would render their commitments to responsible sourcing utterly meaningless,” he said.

Ieng Vuthy of Equitable Cambodia, another non-governmental organisation helping in the lawsuit, said he had no information about the latest development in the case.

Huoy Chhuoy, one of the affected villagers from O’Bat Moan Village, said yesterday that he and other villagers have been waiting for many years for the company to compensate them.

He said Angkor Sugar Company took away the villagers’ land, thus crippling their livelihoods as they were unable to farm on their land and children dropped out of schools as parents could not support them.

“We are not happy and are demanding that the company pay us compensation. We filed a complaint for compensation because we are unable to farm on our land. They made us migrate from our villages and [eventually] we ended up with bank loans,” he said.

Chhuoy said in O’Bat Moan village, the government agreed on August 6 to return the land to 214 affected families in phases. But 92 families have yet to receive it despite being part of the first phase.

Oddar Meanchey provincial Land Management Department director Kim Keavin said yesterday that the authorities resolved the issue by returning the land to the affected families and even to those who did not have any.

“We had agreed that if the villagers don’t have land, the provincial authority would provide social land concessions of 2ha to each family.”

“Actually, only 214 families filed complaints, but when we measured the land for them, other families said they were also affected and the figures increased to 412 families,” he said.