Independent UN human rights experts have condemned the M23 armed group’s “reign of terror” over territory it controls in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), calling for an end to the Rwanda-backed group’s sexual torture and violence against civilians.

The conflict in eastern DRC, which began in 2021 with the Rwandan-backed and Tutsi-led M23 militia taking up arms against the Congolese military, has displaced over eight million people. An April report by UN Secretary-General António Guterres found that cases of sexual violence perpetrated by M23 against civilians more than doubled between 2024 and 2025. The armed group exerts control through arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, forced labour, arson, abduction, blackmail, and forced armed recruitment.

“Rapes, gang rapes, violent assaults and killings of civilians are a common feature of M23’s modus operandi,” the experts said in a press release. “While these crimes are not exclusive to M23, the number of individuals affected is staggering and must end.”

Meanwhile, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) expressed concern after two children were killed and at least 50 more injured in attacks across Ukraine last week.

In Southeast Asia, local crime syndicates have merged separate criminal markets into a single transnational criminal economy increasingly resistant to law enforcement, according to a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Scam losses across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand reached between $88 billion and $114 billion in 2025, surpassing the GDP of many countries. UNODC regional representative Delphine Schantz noted, “What we are seeing is a shift in which groups that stayed within their own geographic domain and criminal specialty are now operating across multiple illicit markets at once, relying on the same service streams.”