South Korea’s suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has been removed from office after the country’s constitutional court voted unanimously to uphold parliament’s decision to impeach him over his ill-fated declaration of martial law in December.

After weeks of deliberations and growing concerns about the future of South Korea’s democracy, all eight justices voted to strip Yoon of his presidential powers.

The ruling means that the acting president, Han Duck-soo, will remain in office until South Koreans elect a new leader within 60 days.

Han vowed to ensure “there are no gaps in national security and diplomacy” and to maintain public safety and order until the vote.

“Respecting the will of our sovereign people, I will do my utmost to manage the next presidential election in accordance with the constitution and the law, ensuring a smooth transition to the next administration,” he said in a televised address.

In a written message to the country’s “beloved citizens” following his removal from office, Yoon said it had been “a great honour” to serve as president.

“I deeply thank all of you who have supported and encouraged me despite my many shortcomings,” he said. “I am very sorry and regretful that I could not live up to your expectations. I will always pray for our beloved Republic of Korea and its citizens.”

While anti-Yoon protesters celebrated the court’s decision – many of them in tears – media reports said some of his supporters had starting damaging police vehicles near the court building.

In the court ruling, broadcast live, the acting chief justice, Moon Hyung-bae, said the decision had been unanimous. “We hereby pronounce the following ruling, with the unanimous agreement of all Justices.“(We) dismiss respondent President Yoon Suk Yeol.”

As crowds outside hung onto his every word, Moon said Yoon had violated his duty as president by taking actions that were beyond the powers granted to him under the constitution. Yoon’s actions, he added, had constituted a serious challenge to democracy.

“(Yoon) committed a grave betrayal of the trust of the people, who are the sovereign members of the democratic republic,” Moon said, adding by declaring martial law, Yoon had created chaos in all areas of society, the economy and foreign policy.

Moon said: “The defendant not only declared martial law, but also violated the constitution and laws by mobilizing military and police forces to obstruct the exercise of legislative authority. Ultimately, the declaration of martial law in this case violated the substantive requirements for emergency martial law.

“Given the grave negative impact on constitutional order and the significant ripple effects of the defendant’s violations, we find that the benefits of upholding the constitution by removing the defendant from office far outweigh the national losses from the removal of a president.”

Yoon, who was not in court for the ruling, cannot appeal and must now turn his attention to a separate criminal trial – linked to his martial law declaration – on charges of insurrection.

His ruling party said it “solemnly accepts” the constitutional court’s decision. “It is regrettable, but the People Power party solemnly accepts and humbly respects the constitutional court’s decision,” lawmaker Kwon Young-se said. “We extend our sincere apologies to the people.”

One of Yoon’s lawyers, Yoon Kap-keun, remained defiant, however, describing the judgement as “completely incomprehensible” and a “purely political decision”.

The long-awaited decision on Yoon’s late-night order to impose martial law in early December has exposed deep divisions in South Korean society and alarmed the US and other allies.

His opponents and supporters have held large rallies in recent days, although an unprecedented police presence meant protesters were unable to access the immediate vicinity of the court building on Friday. Reports said that 14,000 police officers had been deployed in the capital in anticipation of possible violence, irrespective of which way the court ruled.

Yoon’s supporters and lawyers argued that the impeachment proceedings were illegal and that he should be immediately returned to office, three years after the conservative populist was voted to lead Asia’s fourth-biggest economy.

A Gallup Korea poll released last week showed 60% of South Koreans said he should be permanently removed from office. His opponents have accused the former prosecutor of abusing his presidential powers in an attempt to suspend democratic institutions and take the country back into its dark authoritarian past.

The opposition-controlled national assembly voted to impeach Yoon in mid-December, a fortnight after he imposed martial law in an attempt, he claimed, to prevent “anti-state” opposition forces with North Korean sympathies from destroying the country.

Yoon was forced to lift the edict after only six hours, however, after lawmakers defied efforts by security forces to seal off parliament and voted to reject it. Yoon has claimed he never intended to fully impose emergency military rule and has tried to downplay the chaos, pointing out that no one was killed or injured.

Yoon became the second South Korean president to be removed from office through impeachment after Park Geun-hye in 2017. If found guilty in his criminal trial, he faces life imprisonment or the death penalty, although South Korea has not carried out an execution since the late 1990s.

Global financial markets have been plunged into turmoil as Donald Trump’s escalating trade war knocked trillions of dollars off the value of the world’s biggest companies and heightened fears of a US recession.

As world leaders reacted to the US president’s “liberation day” tariff policies demolishing the international trading order, about $2.5tn (£1.9tn) was wiped off Wall Street and share prices in other financial centres across the globe.

Experts said Trump’s sweeping border taxes of between 10% and 50% on the US’s traditional allies and enemies alike had dramatically added to the risk of a steep global downturn and a recession in the world’s biggest economy.

World leaders from Brussels to Beijing rounded on Trump. China condemned “unilateral bullying” practices and the EU said it was drawing up countermeasures.

While Trump timed his Wednesday evening Rose Garden address to avoid live tickers of crashing stock markets, that fate arrived when Asian exchanges opened hours later.

Drawing comparisons with the market crashes at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and the 2008 financial collapse, the sell-off swept the globe, sending exchanges plunging in Asia and Europe. The UK’s FTSE 100 index of blue-chip companies closed the day down 133 points, or 1.5%, to 8,474 after suffering its worst day since August.

All three main US stock markets were down at the end of trading in their worst day since June 2020, during the Covid pandemic. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 5.97%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 4.8% and 3.9%, respectively. Apple and Nvidia, two of the US’s largest companies by market value, lost a combined $470bn in value by midday.

Libby Cantrill, the head of US public policy at Pimco, one of the world’s largest bond fund managers, said investors were growing increasingly concerned as Trump appeared to be unwilling to soften his stance in the face of market turmoil, although hope remained that he would ultimately strike deals with US trading partners.

“There is likely a limit to how much pain he and his administration are willing to endure in order to rebalance the economy, but when that is or what that looks like remains to be seen,” she said.

“For now, we should assume that his pain tolerance is pretty high and that tariffs stick around for a while.”

The US dollar hit a six-month low, falling 2.2% on Thursday morning, amid a growing loss of confidence in a currency previously considered the safest in the world for most of the past century.

Warning clients to beware a “dollar confidence crisis”, George Saravelos, the head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank, said: “The safe-haven properties of the dollar are being eroded.”

The heaviest falls in share prices on Thursday were reserved for US companies with complex international supply chains stretching into the countries that Trump is targeting with billions of dollars in fresh border taxes.

Apple, which makes most of its iPhones, tablets and other devices for the US market in China, was down 9.5% at close of trading, and there were steep declines for other large multinationals including Microsoft, Nvidia, Dell and HP.

Commodities fell sharply, including a 7% plunge in oil prices, reflecting growing concerns over the global economic outlook.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Trump said: “I think it’s going very well. It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on and it’s a big thing. I said this would be exactly the way it is … We’ve never seen anything like it. The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom. The country is going to boom.”

Trump later said: “Every country is calling us. That’s the beauty of what we do. If we would have asked these countries to do us a favour they would have said no. Now they will do anything for us.”

Over the last nearly 24 hours, Trump has faced widespread backlash from US lawmakers and global leaders over his tariffs plan, with the senior Republican senator Mitch McConnell calling it “bad policy” while Canada – a traditional American ally – called the tariffs “unjustified” and “unwanted”.

Tariffs will fall heavily on some of the world’s poorest countries, with nations in south-east Asia, including Myanmar, among the most affected.

Cambodia, where about one in five of the population live below the poverty line, was the worst-hit country in the region with a tariff rate of 49%. Vietnam faces 46% tariffs and Myanmar, reeling from a devastating earthquake and years of civil war after a 2021 military coup, was hit with 44%.

Analysts warned that garment and sports shoe makers, which rely heavily on production in south-east Asia, face rising costs, which will push up prices for consumers around the globe. The share prices of Nike, Adidas and Puma all fell steeply.

Analysts said Trump’s measures would raise the average tariff, or border tax, charged by the US to the highest level since 1933, in a development that threatened to sink the US into recession while increasing living costs for consumers.

Trump’s plans involve imposing a 10% tariff on all US trading partners from just after midnight on 5 April, before additional higher tariffs of up to 50% are imposed on countries including China, Vietnam and the EU.

The non-partisan Tax Foundation thinktank said it estimated the plan would represent a “$1.8tn tax hike” for US consumers, which would cause imports to fall by more than a quarter, or $900bn, in 2025.

While the measures will hit the US hard, researchers at the consultancy Oxford Economics said they could sink global economic growth to the lowest annual rate since the 2008 financial crisis, barring the height of the Covid pandemic.

Countries scrambled to assess the fallout and whether to retaliate. The UK, which was hit with the lowest level of 10% tariffs, suggested it may retaliate even as it tries to strike a deal with Washington.

It published a 417-page list of US products on which it could impose tariffs, including meat, fish and dairy products, whiskey and rum, clothing, motorcycles and musical instruments.

The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, told MPs that ministers were still pursuing an economic deal with the US as the priority but “we do reserve the right to take any action we deem necessary if a deal is not secured”.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Trump’s decision to impose tariffs of 20% on EU goods was “brutal and unfounded”, while Germany’s outgoing chancellor, Olaf Scholz, called it “fundamentally wrong”.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the “protectionist” tariffs ran “contrary to the interests of millions of citizens on this side of the Atlantic and in the US”.

The EU is thought to be preparing retaliatory tariffs on US consumer and industrial goods – likely to include emblematic products such as orange juice, blue jeans and Harley-Davidson motorbikes – to be announced in mid-April, in response to steel and aluminium tariffs previously announced by Trump.

Global financial markets were roiled by Donald Trump’s latest tariff announcement – with trillions of dollars knocked off the value of the world’s biggest companies and heightened fears of a US recession.

In the US, the main indices saw their worst one-day falls in five years as the president claimed that “the markets are going to boom” in response to his sweeping tariffs.

The scale of the sell-off highlights just how alarmed investors are by the tariffs, and the fears they could lead to a recession.

Here are the key stories at a glance:

Catching up? Here’s what happened on 2 April 2025.

An Israeli bombing of a school turned shelter in Gaza City has killed at least 27 people, rescuers said, and hundreds of thousands in the Rafah area are fleeing in one of the biggest mass displacements of the war amid Israel’s newly announced campaign to “divide up” the Gaza Strip.

Three missiles hit Dar al-Arqam school in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood on Thursday afternoon, the civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal said, killing several children and wounding 100 people.

The building was being used as a shelter for Palestinians displaced from their homes. In a statement, the Israeli military said it had taken precautions to avoid civilian casualties in the bombing of what it described as a control centre for the militant group Hamas.

Another 20 people were killed in a dawn airstrike on the Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, bringing the total number of casualties reported by the local health ministry to 97 in the past 24 hours.

The intense wave of Israeli bombing comes amid a major expansion of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) aerial and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory following Israel’s decision to abandon a two-month-old ceasefire two weeks ago.

The Israeli military said on Thursday it had struck more than 600 “terror targets” across the strip since resuming large-scale airstrikes on 18 March. Gaza’s health ministry, which the UN relies on for casualty data, says 1,163 people have been killed in bombings since the ceasefire collapsed.

On Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the army was “seizing territory” and “dividing up” Gaza. Israel has cut off humanitarian aid, food and fuel to the strip for over a month in an effort to pressure Hamas.

He did not elaborate on how much Palestinian land Israel intended to capture in the renewed offensive, but according to Ocha, the UN humanitarian agency, the IDF has declared 64% of the territory military buffer zones and “no-go” zones for civilians.

Netanyahu’s latest announcement has renewed fears of permanent displacement for the strip’s 2.3 million residents. It is also likely to inflame worries that Israel intends to permanently take control of the territory.

On Thursday, local media footage showed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the southern city of Rafah and surrounding areas, as Israeli ground troops advanced to create Netanyahu’s newly announced security corridor. Movement was impeded, however, by at least three Israeli strikes on the two main roads leading north.

The “Morag route” is named for a Jewish settlement that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis, suggesting the new military zone will separate the two southern cities in the same manner as Israel’s Netzarim corridor, just south of Gaza City.

The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, in which Israel says 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, were killed and a further 250 taken captive. Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 50,357 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Efforts led by Qatari and Egyptian mediators to restart ceasefire talks have so far failed.

People on the Aegean islands, more used in April to the sight and scent of spring’s blossoms, have been left reeling from flash floods spurred by typhoon-strength gales, with authorities calling a state of emergency in some of Greece’s most popular destinations less than three weeks before Easter.

“It’s a total catastrophe and it happened in just two hours,” said Costas Bizas, the mayor of Paros, the island worst hit by weather not seen in decades. “We need all the help we can get.”

On Paros and Mykonos, two of the country’s most visited islands, officials were racing against the clock to complete clean-up operations before the arrival of tourists for the Easter break.

Scrambling to address the chaos after the area’s heaviest rainfall in 20 years, emergency crews on the Cycladic islands and farther south in Rhodes and Crete reported “apocalyptic” scenes. In Paros, people saw cars, motorcycles and beachside restaurant furniture hurtling into the sea as torrential rain flooded shops and homes and turned streets into debris-filled streams. The picturesque port of Naoussa was transformed into a “lake of mud”, local people said, with the sea and land “becoming one”. Large parts of the road network were devastated.

In Mykonos, another hotspot expected to attract thousands of visitors at Easter, hailstorms triggered landslides, with muddy flood waters cascading through its white-washed alleys. Civil protection services urged residents to restrict their movements and stay indoors. In Crete’s port town of Chania, officials spoke of “biblical destruction” as images of flooded streets, hospitals and courthouses also emerged.

Schools on several islands were closed, and inhabitants were still picking their way through silt-strewn streets on Thursday.

Meteorologists said more rain was dumped on Paros over the course of a couple of hours on Tuesday than would normally fall in an entire month. “It’s incredible, really, that there were no casualties,” said one official.

Climate breakdown is causing extreme rainfall to become more common and more intense across most of the world, and flooding has most probably become more frequent and severe in these locations as a result.

But the devastation at tourist destinations that, thanks to the rise in global travel, increasingly draw record numbers has also highlighted Greece’s lack of preparedness in dealing with natural disasters.

Critics have singled out the absence of proper flood management systems, as well as unregulated development on the Aegean islands, which have attracted ever more visitors seeking villas, swimming pools and other high-end services.

“Yes, the rainfall was intense but what turned it into a disaster wasn’t just nature; it was the result of decades of unsustainable construction,” wrote the Greek environmentalist and former MEP Kriton Arsenis.

“Paros has been overbuilt at a dramatic pace. In the past five years alone, it has topped the Cyclades in new building permits, surpassing even Mykonos and Santorini. Villas, hotels, roads and swimming pools have replaced the dry-stone terraces that once held water, slowed down runoff and kept the soil alive.”

In the effort to construct and to cater to ever more tourists, natural gullies had been cemented over, he said. “They no longer hold or filter water. They simply accelerate it – pushing it downhill with force, until it floods homes, or is lost to the sea.”

It was critical, he said, that a way was found in such heavily built environments to absorb, store and release rainwater slowly. “This wasn’t just a flood. It was a failure of planning … [and] this same story is unfolding all along the Mediterranean coast.”

At a time when anger over the impoverished state of public services has also prompted some of the largest protests in years – with hundreds of thousands of Greeks taking to the streets in fury on the second anniversary of the Tempe rail disaster – others bemoaned the lack of state funding on islands whose populations dwindled drastically in winter.

“Not enough money, clearly, is put into civil protection,” said Mykonos’s former mayor Konstantinos Koukas. “To fix that, funds have to stop being allocated based on the permanent population of a place. It’s why we have the scenes we see today, clearing up after a storm when Easter is just a few weeks away.”

The prominent commentator Nikos Syrigos, who hails from the Cycladic isle of Syros, said that despite tourism being the engine of Greece’s economy, the underdevelopment of its islands meant destinations that were “giants in the summer” became “dwarfs in the winter”.

“Streets that have been turned into streams [by this storm] will be turned into them again,” he said this week. “Unfortunately, the Cyclades have remained years behind when it comes to infrastructure and are completely ill-prepared to withstand any intense [weather] phenomenon, much less any that is extreme.”

The inspector general of the Department of Defense (DoD) is launching an investigation into Pentagon secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information about military operations in Yemen.

The investigation, announced on Thursday, follows a bipartisan request from the Senate armed services committee after allegations emerged that highly precise – and most likely classified – intelligence about impending US airstrikes in Yemen, including strike timing and aircraft models, had been shared in a Signal group chat that included a journalist.

Investigators will also review compliance with classification and records retention requirements – which appear to have been defied by a timer set on the channel.

The investigation will “determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business”, the memo by acting Pentagon inspector general Steve Stebbins reads.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon declined to comment on ongoing investigations.

The Republican senate armed services committee chair, Roger Wicker, and Democrat ranking member, Jack Reed, requested the investigation after learning that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, had been included in a Signal group chat with national security council members discussing Yemen operations.

“This chat was alleged to have included classified information pertaining to sensitive military actions in Yemen,” the senators wrote in their letter.

“If true, this reporting raises questions as to the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”

The Atlantic published the messages shared by Hegseth on Signal, which included operational details about strikes against Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, such as launch times of F-18 fighter jets, bomb drop timings and naval Tomahawk missile launches – sent before the operation had been carried out.

The White House and Hegseth himself have aggressively maintained that the Signal messages were merely “team updates” lacking classified sources or methods.

Yet the Pentagon’s own classification guidelines suggest the kind of detailed military plans in the Signal chat would typically be classified at least at the “secret” level, while some of the real-time updates could have risen to a higher level of classification. Hegseth’s messages even included the phrase “clean on OPSEC” – operational security – implying he recognized the sensitivity of the information being shared.

The former state department attorney Brian Finucane, who has extensive experience in counter-terrorism operations including strikes against Houthis, told the Guardian the specificity of aircraft information suggested the information was classified, and that “in my experience, this kind of pre-operational detail would have been classified”.

The inspector general’s evaluation will be conducted in Washington and at US Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, with additional locations potentially coming as the investigation proceeds.

The inspector general of the Department of Defense (DoD) is launching an investigation into Pentagon secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information about military operations in Yemen.

The investigation, announced on Thursday, follows a bipartisan request from the Senate armed services committee after allegations emerged that highly precise – and most likely classified – intelligence about impending US airstrikes in Yemen, including strike timing and aircraft models, had been shared in a Signal group chat that included a journalist.

Investigators will also review compliance with classification and records retention requirements – which appear to have been defied by a timer set on the channel.

The investigation will “determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business”, the memo by acting Pentagon inspector general Steve Stebbins reads.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon declined to comment on ongoing investigations.

The Republican senate armed services committee chair, Roger Wicker, and Democrat ranking member, Jack Reed, requested the investigation after learning that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, had been included in a Signal group chat with national security council members discussing Yemen operations.

“This chat was alleged to have included classified information pertaining to sensitive military actions in Yemen,” the senators wrote in their letter.

“If true, this reporting raises questions as to the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”

The Atlantic published the messages shared by Hegseth on Signal, which included operational details about strikes against Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, such as launch times of F-18 fighter jets, bomb drop timings and naval Tomahawk missile launches – sent before the operation had been carried out.

The White House and Hegseth himself have aggressively maintained that the Signal messages were merely “team updates” lacking classified sources or methods.

Yet the Pentagon’s own classification guidelines suggest the kind of detailed military plans in the Signal chat would typically be classified at least at the “secret” level, while some of the real-time updates could have risen to a higher level of classification. Hegseth’s messages even included the phrase “clean on OPSEC” – operational security – implying he recognized the sensitivity of the information being shared.

The former state department attorney Brian Finucane, who has extensive experience in counter-terrorism operations including strikes against Houthis, told the Guardian the specificity of aircraft information suggested the information was classified, and that “in my experience, this kind of pre-operational detail would have been classified”.

The inspector general’s evaluation will be conducted in Washington and at US Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, with additional locations potentially coming as the investigation proceeds.

Indian police said on Thursday they had arrested a US tourist who sneaked on to a highly restricted island carrying a coconut and a can of Diet Coke to a tribe untouched by the industrial world.

Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, set foot on the restricted territory of North Sentinel – part of India’s Andaman Islands – in an attempt to meet the Sentinelese people, who are believed to number only about 150.

All outsiders, Indians and foreigners alike, are banned from travelling within 3 miles (5km) of the island to protect the Indigenous people from outside diseases and to preserve their way of life.

“The American citizen was presented before the local court after his arrest and is now on a three-day remand for further interrogation,” the Andaman and Nicobar Islands police chief, HGS Dhaliwal, told AFP.

Satellite photographs show a coral reef-fringed island – stretching to some 6 miles at its widest point – with thick forest and white sand beaches.

The Sentinelese last made international headlines in 2018 after they killed John Allen Chau, 27, an American missionary who landed illegally on their beach.

Chau’s body was not recovered and there were no investigations over his death because of the Indian law prohibiting anyone from going to the island.

India sees the wider Andaman and Nicobar Islands as strategically sited on key global shipping lanes. They are closer to Myanmar than mainland India.

New Delhi plans to invest at least $9bn (£6.7bn) to expand naval and airbases, troop accommodation, the port and the main city in the region.

Dhaliwal said Polyakov kept blowing a whistle off the shore of North Sentinel Island for about an hour to attract the tribe’s attention before he went ashore.

“He landed briefly for about five minutes, left the offerings on the shore, collected sand samples, and recorded a video before returning to his boat,” Dhaliwal said. “A review of his GoPro camera footage showed his entry and landing into the restricted North Sentinel Island.”

Police said Polyakov was arrested late on Monday, about two days after he went ashore, and had visited the region twice in recent months.

He first used an inflatable kayak in October 2024 but was stopped by hotel staff, police said on Thursday. Polyakov made another unsuccessful attempt during a visit in January 2025.

This time Polyakov used another inflatable boat with a motor to travel the roughly 35 kilometres (22 miles) of open sea from the main archipelago.

The Sentinelese, whose language and customs remain a mystery to outsiders, shun all contact and have a record of hostility to anyone who tries to get close.

A photograph issued by the Indian coastguard and Survival International two decades ago showed a Sentinelese man aiming a bow and arrow at a passing helicopter.

Indian authorities have prosecuted any locals who have aided attempts to enter the island and are trying to identify anyone who may have helped Polyakov.

The Andamans are also home to the 400-strong Jarawa tribe, who activists say are also threatened by contact from outsiders. Tourists have previously bribed local officials in an attempt to spend time with the Jarawa.

The EU is being urged to put human rights centre stage as it begins its first summit with the leaders of central Asia.

The president of the European Council, António Costa, and the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, are meeting the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on Friday.

Hosted by Uzbekistan’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the group will discuss trade, counter-terrorism, climate and energy ties in Samarkand, a stop on the ancient Silk Road linking Asia and the west that is now a symbol of rapid development in the region.

Ties between the EU and the former Soviet republics of central Asia have intensified since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The two sides have pledged to improve transport links, through a project known as the trans-Caspian transport corridor, which aims to cut the overland journey between the EU and central Asia by half, down to no more than 15 days. Brussels also hopes for endorsement of a text on critical raw materials that are abundant in the region and needed for the EU’s green transition.

One senior EU official said it was “a landmark summit” and that central Asian countries showed “a corresponding wish to deepen the relationship with the EU and to diversify their foreign policy”.

Ahead of the summit, the most complex issue – for the central Asian countries – was how to refer to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the final declaration. Kazakhstan, once one of Russia’s closes allies, has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, maintained contact with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and banned Russian military propaganda symbols. Kazakhstan, however, joined Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in abstaining on a recent UN general assembly vote calling for “peaceful resolution of the war in Ukraine”.

The European parliament has also raised concerns about Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan being “possible hubs” allowing Russia to circumvent western sanctions.

Amid shifting geopolitical alliances and the scramble for mineral wealth, campaigners are urging the EU not to overlook human rights.

“These new partnerships are very important, but they will not be sustainable and will not really secure the EU’s interests unless the EU also cares about rule of law in the region and protection of rights,” Iskra Kirova, of Human Rights Watch, said.

The EU, she added, was not using its leverage in a credible way. She questioned the union’s decision to sign a wide-ranging trade and cooperation deal with Kyrgyzstan last June, after Bishkek adopted a Russian-style “foreign representatives” law that requires NGOs receiving funds from abroad to bear this designation. The law stigmatises organisations and has had a “very chilling effect” on Kyrgyz civil society, Kirova said.

The EU “does not insist that there will be concrete achievements before it grants these kinds of straight benefits or bilateral agreements”, she said, referring also to preferential trade deals.

A senior EU official said a plan for criminal sanctions in the original Kyrgyz NGO bill had been dropped following EU intervention, adding this was “a major difference” with similar laws in Russia and Belarus. “We are not going there to preach,” a second official said. “But the more we have a dialogue and engagement and interaction, the more we believe that we can change and improve all the things that concern us.”

Maisy Weicherding at Amnesty International said the EU needed to set an example by ensuring “human rights due diligence” was part of any infrastructure project, listing actions including environmental and climate impact assessments, consulting local people and ensuring no forced displacement.

Such due diligence would be crucial in Uzbekistan, she said, where a UN special rapporteur found in 2024 that large numbers of people were being forced out of their homes to make way for large-scale redevelopment. “It is really imperative that [the EU] do not just go in and endorse repressive practices in these countries but try and insist proper human rights procedures are followed.”

The summit host, Mirziyoyev, became Uzbekistan’s president in 2016, after the death of the dictator Islam Karimov. He has introduced reforms, including clamping down on forced labour in cotton fields. Rights groups say his government allows no dissent and voting remains tightly controlled, such as in a recent referendum introducing constitutional changes that will enable Mirziyoyev to remain in power until 2040.

Jana Toom, the vice-chair of the European parliament’s delegation for central Asia, said central Asian countries were not doing enough to stop circumvention of EU sanctions against Russia, although she added that they had not made any commitments on this score.

Asked whether the EU was striking the right balance between economic interests and human rights, the Estonian liberal MEP said: “I believe that if we have beneficial cooperation between the European Union and central Asia, things will improve. It will take time, of course. And we have to take into account also the fact where they find themselves: between Russia and China, and they are trying to balance.”

The privy council in London will soon be called upon to make the final decision on a court case to remove homophobic laws in Trinidad and Tobago.

The laws were repealed in 2018 in a high court judgment that struck from the statute book the “buggery law” that had criminalised consensual anal sex since an act passed in 1925 under British rule. However, last week Trinidad’s supreme court upheld a government appeal against the ruling and recriminalised the act, dealing a hammer blow to LGBTQ+ rights in the Caribbean country and prompting the UK Foreign Office to update its advice for LGBTQ+ travellers.

The 2018 case was brought by Jason Jones, an LGBTQ+ activist. This week he said he would continue the fight before the privy council – Trinidad’s final court of appeal. Central to his argument will be the controversial “savings clause”, which former British empire jurisdictions such as Trinidad can revert to whenever a challenge is made to their constitution.

“This backwards step revolves around the savings clause, which was designed as an instrument for the smooth transition of power upon independence in 1962 to protect the laws we had for hundreds of years. That clause is now being used against democracy in our country,” said Jones.

Jones argues that because Trinidad and Tobago altered its sexual offences legislation three times – in 1976 when it became a republic, in 1986, and in 2000 – the law can no longer be classified as “saved”.

“These are Trinidadian laws,” he said. “Parliament is hiding its homophobic bigotry behind an archaic clause that serves no useful purpose in a modern democratic country.”

The mood among Trinidad’s LGBTQ+ people is a far cry from their tears of joy on the steps of Port of Spain’s Hall of Justice seven years ago. Back then, the judge Devindra Rampersad delivered a poetic ruling that swept away nearly a century of discrimination enshrined in law.

“This is a case about the dignity of the person, not the will of the majority or any religious view,” Rampersad said at the time. “History has proven that the two do not always coincide.”

For the law to be constitutional, he added, every Trinidadian must be free “to make decisions as to whom he or she loves”.

In contrast, the weighty 196-page report from which the appeal judge Nolan Bereux read in overturning Jones v AG was clinical, claiming, “Judges cannot change the law. We give effect to parliament’s intention. Buggery remains a crime in Trinidad and Tobago.”

The judgment reverted to a familiar trope that the law is never actually enforced in practice. “No one has been charged or punished … for engaging in consensual anal sex in the privacy of his or her home,” it said.

But LGBTQ+ activists say enforcement is not the point. Jones’s victory was achieved on the grounds that the law denied him his human rights and right to privacy.

The cofounder of Pride TT, Kennedy Maraj, described last week’s ruling as a devastating setback and a betrayal by the justice system. “It tells LGBTQ+ individuals their very existence remains subject to legal scrutiny, that progress is fragile and that hard-won rights can be overturned,” Maraj said.

Patrick Lee Loy came out to his family at 30. As one of few openly gay Trinidadian men, he said he felt “shocked and angry that, as a community, we will not be free to express who we love”.

Although Trinidad is notoriously hedonistic – its exuberance plain to see at carnival where hundreds of thousands of straight, gay, lesbian and trans Trinidadians parade the streets wearing next to nothing – the undercurrent of religious piety and even extremism that runs through its Catholic, Hindu, Anglican, Muslim and evangelical traditionalists heavily influences opinions on sexual freedom.

Whether it is safe to be gay in Trinidad is a complex question – more so than in Jamaica, where the answer is an outright no. Away from the more liberal confines of the capital, there are many communities where to be gay puts you in danger.

“I know a few gay men who were murdered,” said Loy. “The crimes were never solved. In one instance, the family did not push for an investigation in case it brought up too many ghosts.

“I have friends who only meet at their home. When we go out to a restaurant or bar, they will not come. They fear for their jobs, families and status. Now that people feel the government will not protect its citizens, some may feel it is easier to target us.”

Jones’s 2018 case triggered a wave of similar cases across the Commonwealth, including in India where homosexuality was decriminalised just months after Trinidad. A new progressive era appeared to have dawned in the global south.

In Trinidad, however, the government immediately appealed against the decision – a move designed to reassure its religious, socially conservative electorate. Backlogs delayed the case, which has taken seven years to be heard by the country’s highest court.

The ruling echoed sentiments in a similar case thrown out by Jamaica’s supreme court in 2023 that such matters were for parliament to decide.

If the privy council rules in favour of Trinidad’s government, Jones says it is time to leave the institution, which “can no longer be of useful service if hamstrung by the savings clause”.

Donald Trump has been ordered by a judge in England to pay more than £620,000 in legal costs after unsuccessfully suing a company over denied allegations he took part in “perverted” sex acts.

The US president brought a data protection claim against Orbis Business Intelligence, a consultancy founded by a former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, in 2022.

Steele authored the report known as the Steele dossier, which included allegations – all denied by Trump – that he had been “compromised” by the Russian security service, the FSB, and also included two memos that claimed he had taken part in “sex parties” while in St Petersburg and consorted with sex workers in Moscow.

Mrs Justice Steyn threw out the claim in February last year without ruling on the truth of the allegations, and ordered Trump to pay Orbis’s costs “of the entire claim” including an initial payment of £290,000, which a hearing in January was told Trump had “decided not to pay”.

That led to him being prevented from taking part in a three-day hearing to decide the size of the total legal bill, after which Judge Rowley on Thursday ordered the US president to pay £626,058.98.

The judge said the figure was “both reasonable and proportionate”, with interest accruing daily at 12%.

In a witness statement, Trump said he had brought the case to prove that claims in the Steele dossier, published by the BuzzFeed website in 2017, that he engaged in “perverted sexual acts” in Russia were false.

Many of the claims in the dossier were never substantiated and lawyers for Trump said the report was “egregiously inaccurate” and contained “numerous false, phoney or made-up allegations”.

Steele was paid by Democrats for research that included salacious allegations Russians could use to blackmail Trump. The dossier assembled in 2016 created a political storm just before Trump’s inauguration with rumours and uncorroborated allegations that have since been largely discredited.

Orbis had said the lawsuit should be thrown out because the report had never been meant to be made public and was published by BuzzFeed without the permission of Steele or Orbis. It also said the claim had been filed too late.

A parliamentary committee has recommended a bill that seeks to radically reinterpret New Zealand’s founding treaty between Māori tribes and the British Crown should not proceed.

The treaty principles bill, which was introduced to parliament by the minor coalition Act party, seeks to abandon a set of well-established principles that guide the relationship between Māori and ruling authorities in favour of its own redefined principles.

The bill prompted a record number of submissions, including more than 300,000 written submissions. After weeks of hearings, the justice select committee reported back to the house on Friday, more than a month ahead of schedule.

In its report the committee said the vast majority of submissions received opposed the legislation. Among the common themes raised by opponents were inconsistency with the treaty, flaws or inadequacies in the bill development process and the negative effect of the bill on social cohesion.

The Act party argues that Māori have been afforded different political and legal rights and privileges compared with non-Māori because of the principles that have flowed from the Treaty of Waitangi – New Zealand’s founding document that is instrumental in upholding Māori rights.

The bill has sparked strident criticism from lawyers, academics and the public, who believe Act’s principles will weaken Māori rights and remove checks on the crown. It has prompted mass meetings of Māori leaders, and the largest ever protest on Māori rights.

The bill’s proponent, Act leader David Seymour, said that high-profile bills often result in committee submissions that “don’t reflect public opinion”.

“Opponents will make much of the balance of submissions, but if they believed the public opposed the bill they could call for a referendum where everyone votes,” he said in a statement after the report.

As part of its coalition agreement with Act, National promised it would support the bill through its first reading and the select committee process. But both National and the third coalition partner, New Zealand First, have said they will vote it down at the second reading.

Prime minister Christopher Luxon told media on Tuesday the committee had been overwhelmed with the number of submissions.

“The positions on the treaty principles bill are well known on all sides of that debate and what’s important now is to actually wrap it up and actually move it forward,” he said.