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Council of Europe raps Italy over difficulty in obtaining abortions

Women’s rights are being violated in Italy by the serious difficulties they face in trying to obtain safe abortions due to many doctors refusing to carry out the procedure, the Council of Europe said on Monday. Terminating pregnancies has been legal in Italy since 1978, but the council’s social rights committee found that the situation in Italy violated both the women’s right to protection of health and the doctors’ right to dignity at work. Women seeking an abortion are sometimes forced to go elsewhere in Italy or abroad, or bypass the authorities to get a termination.

Tanzanian woman wins landmark case over childbirth operation

By Kizito Makoye DAR ES SALAAM (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A woman left unable to have children after a defective caesarian section operation in Tanzania has won a landmark case against a local hospital whose surgeon left a piece of cloth inside her. Mwamini Adam and her husband filed a lawsuit at the high court in western Tabora region against Urambo District Council’s hospital four years ago, demanding 500 million Tanzanian Shillings ($265,000) for physical and emotional distress. Adam, 37, accused Jacob Kamanda, a gynecologist and obstetrician at the district hospital, of professional negligence and misconduct after he left a piece of cloth in her stomach after performing a caesarian section operation. She said the defective operation meant she can no longer give birth because doctors performing a life-saving corrective operation decided to remove her uterus.

U.N. investigators to publish Syria war crimes suspect names

By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) – United Nations war crimes investigators plan to publish names of suspects involved in Syria’s four-year war and push for new ways to bring them to justice, in a radical change of strategy announced on Friday. Diplomatic sources said the independent Commission of Inquiry, led by Brazilian investigator Paulo Pinheiro, may publish some or all of hundreds of names on secret lists of suspects at the U.N. Human Rights Council on March 17. Pinheiro, speaking to reporters after informally briefing the U.N. Security Council, refused to be drawn, saying any release of names would need to “be of some use” and have some “follow-up”. The investigators have already drawn up four lists including military and security commanders, the heads of detention facilities, and commanders of non-state armed groups, including the so-called “emirs” of radical groups, they said.