US President Barack Obama visited a memorial commemorating victims of Argentina's military dictatorship, during his visit to the country.

The US is widely believed to have been involved in the coup which led to the dictatorship, under which an estimated 30,000 people were killed by the state.

 Ukraine extended its sanctions lust against Russia to include people and institutions involved in the detention of Ukrainian citizens.

The Ukrainian Security and Defence Council announcement came after Russia sentenced Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko to 22 years in prison on Friday.

An inquiry to investigate human rights abuses in South Sudan has been set up by the UN Human Rights Council during its 31st sitting in Geneva this month.

The three-member commission, the proposal of which was initiated by the US and Albania, will have a renewable one-year mandate.

The International Criminal Court has convicted Congolese politician Jean-Pierre Bemba of war crimes and crimes against humanity this week. The court held him responsible for a devastating campaign of rape, murder and torture in the Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003. 

The three-judge panel convicted Mr Bemba of murder and pillaging, and defined the large-scale rape by his soldiers as a crime against humanity and as a war crime.

The declaration of a federal region in northern Syria by Kurdish groups “could offer a model for decentralized governance in a federated Syria,” said the New York Times this week.

In an editorial entitled ‘The Kurds’ Push for Self-Rule in Syria’, it said “the Kurds are an ethnic group of perhaps 35 million in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, and they have long argued that they are the world’s largest ethnic group without a state”.

“They have suffered persecution and had their aspirations for self-governance crushed,” continued the New York Times, noting that “the American invasion of Iraq created an opportunity for Kurds living there to establish a semiautonomous region in northern Iraq, which has been reasonably successful”.

The editorial went on to conclude:

“The Syrian Kurds say they are not seeking total independence, only a democratic region in which they, Arabs and other ethnic groups can live together. This may be an idea worth building on as part of a political solution to end the war and the slaughter of civilians.”

US President Barack Obama has begun his visit to Cuba, becoming the first American president to do so in 88 years.

After meeting with the government and holding bilateral discussions, the President will meet with Cuban civil society, including human rights activists.

On human rights, the White House had previously written:

The UN Security Council has unanimously condemned the "unacceptable" ballistic missile launches by North Korea.

In a statement, the Security Council said the latest firings "constituted a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions".

A suicide bomb in Istanbul has killed at least four people, in the latest violence in Turkey's largest city.

According to Turkish media, the attack in a shopping district killed three Israelis and one Iranian citizen.

Following the United States’ declaration that the Islamic State is committing genocide in Iraq and Syria, the New York Times said the evidence against the militant group was “indisputable”.

“Since the Holocaust, the United States has designated wide-scale killing as genocide only four times: Cambodia in 1989, Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994 and Sudan in 2004,” said the New York Times in an editorial.

“To those it has now added the Islamic State’s rampage in Iraq and Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Thursday.”

Noting that “the term genocide, first specified in the 1948 United Nations Convention, refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”,” the paper said “the evidence against the Islamic State is indisputable”.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said that Islamic State (IS) has been committing genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims in Syria and Iraq on Thursday.

In a televised address Mr Kerry said the militant group “is genocidal by self proclamation, by ideology and by actions”.

"The fact is Daesh kills Christians because they are Christians, Yazidis because they are Yazidis, Shias because they are Shias," he said, adding that "we will all we can to see that the perpetrators are held accountable."

Though State Department spokesman Mark Toner had already stated the usage of the term ‘genocide’ "would not necessarily result in any particular legal obligation for the United States," the move represents a significant moment nonetheless.

Mr Kerry’s declaration marks only the second time the executive branch of the US has used the term ‘genocide’ to describe atrocities committed during an ongoing conflict.