After years of diplomatic stalemate, Myanmar has agreed to receive an initial group of 5,000 Rohingya refugees currently in Malaysia, with more expected to follow.  For a country that has hosted tens of thousands of Rohingya over decades despite not being a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the announcement could represent a long-awaited breakthrough.

But it has also raised serious concerns. Five international rights groups -Nationality For All, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, Global Movement Against Statelessness, Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network and the Dignified Citizenship Coalition Asia Pacific – have urged Putrajaya not to proceed with repatriation, warning that the Rohingya continue to face risks of persecution and genocide in Myanmar.

For decades, many Rohingya in Myanmar have lived without citizenship or equal legal protection. Their predicament is therefore not simply an immigration problem. It is also a citizenship problem. The denial of legal recognition has contributed to restrictions affecting education, health care, employment, freedom of movement and political participation. The mass displacement of 2017 was not an isolated movement of people across a border. It followed years of discrimination and insecurity.

The Rohingya crisis is also larger than Malaysia. Bangladesh remains the principal destination for those who fled Myanmar, hosting a vast refugee population in camps in Cox’s Bazar and elsewhere. Generations of Rohingya children are growing up there, often without a clear path to citizenship or permanent integration. Bangladesh has carried an enormous humanitarian burden, and its generosity cannot be taken for granted. At the same time, the longer the refugees remain in camps, the more difficult and uncertain their future becomes.

India presents another reality. Rohingya refugees there have faced an increasingly difficult environment, with questions over documentation, detention and deportation adding to their insecurity. India, like Malaysia, is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Indonesia offers a different picture. Rohingya have reached its shores by sea, particularly in Aceh, where local communities have sometimes responded with compassion but also with growing unease over new arrivals. These experiences differ, but they reveal a common regional problem. Asia has no comprehensive system for sharing responsibility for refugees. Countries receiving displaced people often carry the burden largely on their own, while the people at the centre of the crisis remain caught between a dangerous homeland and uncertain refuge.

Mount Kailash is sacred to Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. They came to the Himalayas seeking spiritual renewal, drawn by Tibet’s sacred, snow-capped Mount Kailash. Instead, many pilgrims were caught in deadly floods that tore through the Nepal-Tibet region, wiping out entire villages. “I saw two buses carrying Indian pilgrims to Kailash Mansarovar,” said 27-year-old Laloma, a Nepali mother. She was rescued on Aug. 27 from Nepal’s devastated area of Syabrubesi, along with her infant son and husband, after sheltering for a freezing night in a school. The buses were swept away, she said.

“They are all gone,” she told AFP. Mount Kailash is sacred to Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. Hindus regard Kailash as the abode of deities Shiva and Parvati, while Tibetan Buddhists associate it with Mount Meru, which they say is the centre of the universe. It is forbidden to climb the 6,638-metre-high (21,778-foot) mountain.  Instead, pilgrims undertake a roughly 52-kilometre (32-mile) contemplative circuit around its base, taking most walkers about three days.

For those en route or returning from the isolated, pyramid-shaped peak and bathing in the frigid ice waters of nearby Lake Mansarovar, across China’s frontier with Nepal, it was meant to be a healing journey of peace.  But climate change is causing glaciers to melt worldwide, increasing the risks of glacial lake floods and glacial collapses.

On Aug. 26 morning, a tsunami-like wall of water and mud powered down, caused by a glacial collapse that sent a torrent of debris downstream, burying homes and sweeping away bridges. More than 470 people are dead and upwards of 1,400 others are missing in both China and Nepal.

Ethnic Garo Christian families came under a mob attack in Sherpur district on Aug. 12

About 200 mostly ethnic minority Christians joined a protest rally in Bangladeshi capital Dhaka demanding a judicial probe into a recent mob attack on Garo Christian villagers. The Garo Student Union (GSU), a body of ethnic Garo students, organized the rally at Dhaka’s Shahbag intersection on Aug. 18. It drew support from a host of political groups, indigenous rights bodies and cultural organizations.

The demonstrators alleged the mob attack by Bengali Muslims on Garo villagers in Purba Gazarikura and nearby areas of Jhenaigati subdistrict in Sherpur district on Aug. 12 was based on unfounded allegations related to the death of a Muslim man.

They also accused the local administration and police of taking sides with the instigators of the attack and detaining five Garo Christians without any proof of their connection to the crime.

Mrinmoy Chiran, a GSU leader from Dhaka, said the physical attack, vandalism and looting left Garo villagers devastated. “They are low-income people. Many of them cannot afford private lawyers to seek justice from the court,” Chiran told UCA News. He said the community is seeking assistance from Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST), a non-government organization, to wage a legal battle for justice.

Garo activist Nilu Chambugong alleged that the discovery of the body was used as a pretext for a planned attack on the community without any investigation into the death. He said that abuses and attacks on ethnic minorities for various reasons, including land disputes and impunity, are very common in Bangladesh.

Migrants remain vulnerable to exploitation, modern slavery, challenging the Church to defend their dignity and freedom. 

How easily can an exploited migrant worker become a victim of modern slavery?

On Aug. 23, the world marked the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. The date recalls the night of Aug. 22-23, 1791, when enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, began a major uprising against slavery. The revolt became a turning point in the Haitian Revolution, which eventually led to the creation of the first independent black republic in 1804.

Today’s migrant labor exploitation cannot simply be equated with the slavery of the past. But the day carries an important lesson: Abolishing slavery did not abolish the exploitation of human beings. Modern slavery does not always look like slavery in history books. There may be no chains, whips or slave markets. Instead, control can begin with a recruitment fee that leaves a worker heavily in debt.

It can continue with false promises of employment, withheld wages and confiscated passports, threats, restrictions on movement or fear of arrest and deportation. For many migrant workers, vulnerability begins before they even reach the country where they will work. Recruitment agents may charge large sums of money. Workers arrive already owing debts and desperate to keep their jobs. Finally because of the merciless attitude of the masters these people become penniless and desperate.

Komal Maria, 23, walks smoothly through the metal detector at the entrance to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Lahore, a northern city regarded as Pakistan’s cultural capital. She routinely presents her purse for inspection, placing her phone in the tray and her keys beside it before nodding as a guard briefly pats her down. For Maria, the armed guard at the church gate, body scanners and heavy iron turnstiles are simply part of the church she grew up attending. Her father, Iqbal Masih, remembers a very different time.

The 52-year-old Masih, walking behind his daughter, appears uneasy. As the guard sweeps a handheld metal detector across his chest, his shoulders tense. He sighs as he looks up at the razor wire coiled above the high concrete wall. “Going to Sunday Mass has changed since the 9/11 terror attacks,” Masih says, noting that over the past 25 years, churches across Pakistan have reinforced their iron gates and checkpoints, and armed security has “become a permanent reality” in churches.

The heightened security has also changed the Church’s pastoral administration, drained its finances and altered the nature of its major churches, which were once seen as cultural landmarks and meeting points for people of different faiths, according to Church leaders.

Almost overnight, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, peaceful places of worship and Church-run schools were forced to tighten security amid fears that militant Islamists could view them as supporters of the US and attack them. After the U.S.-led war in neighboring Afghanistan began in October 2001, Christian communities across Pakistan sought state protection for their communities and institutions as they faced heightened threats from domestic extremist groups that equated Christians with Western countries.  “What began as temporary, emergency measures slowly hardened into permanent fixtures,” said Younas John, 62, a long time parishioner in Lahore. “To respect local cultural sensitivities,” churches also introduced more discreet screening arrangements.

Officers were seen loading confiscated items into the back of a van five people suspected of selling and displaying books deemed “seditious” in Hong Kong have been arrested after police raided two independent bookshops.

Authorities said the publications incited “hatred” against the territory’s government, judiciary and law enforcement agencies. Officers seized books from both shops, the government said in a statement.

The group – two men aged 37 and 57, and three women aged between 30 and 59 – are suspected of violating national security legislation by “acting with seditious intent”.

They are currently being held for investigation. If convicted, they could face up to seven years in prison.

Officials did not name the businesses raided by police. Reporters from the AFP news agency saw officers leading a woman in handcuffs the Have A Nice Stay bookshop into a van.

The shop in the city’s densely packed Mong Kok area was founded in 2022 by a group of former journalists, stocking literature on democracy, authoritarianism and media literacy.

The raid came a day after it announced it would be shutting down in August, citing financial reasons and what it called an “elusive ‘red line'” over what material is considered problematic.

Local media reported the nearby Greenfield Book Store was also targeted.

On its Facebook page, the shop says it stocks books from Hong Kong and Taiwan, covering “literature, history, philosophy, art, sociology and self-improvement”.

Neither business is attending this year’s Hong Kong Book Fair, which opened on Wednesday.

There have been two other raids on bookshops in Hong Kong in 2026. Two workers were arrested at the Hunter store in June, and a further four were arrested from Book Punch in March.

Amnesty International said the raids indicated “the chilling reality of what the city has become: a place where you can be criminalised simply for what’s on your bookshelf”.

Detained Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been allowed to meet a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the first confirmed outside contact with her since a letter to her son two and a half years ago.

In photographs of the meeting released by the military government Suu Kyi appeared to be healthy.

She was detained shortly after the armed forces deposed her government in 2021, and sentenced to 33 years in jail on what are widely viewed as trumped-up charges, though her sentence has been reduced and she has been moved to house arrest.

Despite repeated assurances from the military that Suu Kyi is alive and well, they have never provided any convincing evidence of this.

Her son Kim Aris has in recent months mounted an international campaign demanding proof of life for the 81-year-old democracy icon.

Now a delegation from the ICRC has been allowed to meet her – her first confirmed meeting with anyone outside the government for nearly four years.

Photographs released of her with the ICRC team show Suu Kyi looking relaxed and well, although no details of her state of health have been given, nor of what they talked about.

The Myanmar government, still headed by coup leader Min Aung Hlaing and dominated by the military despite an election held earlier this year, is trying to end its diplomatic isolation in a series of official visits to neighbouring countries.

Among the top demands being made of Myanmar’s military leadership is that they end the aerial bombardment of opposition-held areas, start negotiations to end the civil war, and release Aung San Suu Kyi.

The US military says it has completed a wave of strikes against Iran in retaliation for attempted ballistic missile attacks on American forces.

The United States has carried out a wave of air strikes against Iran in retaliation for an attempted ballistic missile attack on American forces on Tuesday, the US military said. US Central Command said dozens of targets belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been hit, in response to Iranian strikes on US bases in Jordan and on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, Iranian state radio reported that three people, including a two-year-old child, had been killed in the strikes on Qeshm island, with further locations hit in the south and west of the country. 

The strikes come during a week in which the conflict has widened, with the first publicly confirmed joint US-Saudi strikes on Iranian-backed proxy forces in Iraq.

The US and Iran have exchanged a series of strikes and counterstrikes since a ceasefire agreed in April collapsed in June. That truce had been intended to halt months of fighting between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Pakistan said on Thursday that it was continuing diplomatic efforts to ease tensions between Washington and Tehran, and called on both sides to return to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding. “The negotiations between the parties are ongoing to normalise the situation, particularly the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, and to de-escalate,” Tahir Hussain Andrabi, spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Office, told a briefing in Islamabad.

As the one year countdown to World Youth Day Seoul 2027 begins on August 3, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, Prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, urges Catholics to walk alongside young people towards Seoul 2027.

With one year to go until world Youth Day 2027, the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) is hard at work as it is moving preparations from groundwork to full implementation across all sectors, including international cooperation, pilgrim services, accommodation, transportation, safety, medical care and communications.

World Youth Day (WYD) occurs every couple of years and gathers together millions of young Catholics, and the 2027 edition will be held in the South Korean capital, Seoul, from August 3 to 8. It will be the second WYD to take place in Asia – following the 1995 one in Manila – and the first in a country where Christianity is a minority faith.

“Over the past three years, we have concentrated on laying the foundations for the event,” said Archbishop Peter Soon-taick Chung of Seoul, President of the LOC.

“The year ahead will be the time to complete our preparations and welcome young people from every part of the world. We will do everything possible to make WYD Seoul 2027 a celebration of hope and a witness to the hospitality and solidarity of Korea and Seoul.”

“With one year to go until the start of World Youth Day Seoul 2027,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, Prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, “the young people who will be travelling to Korea alongside their pastors are increasingly at the heart of the preparations for the event.”

“Over its forty-year history,” he emphasized, “World Youth Day has been progressively enriched thanks to the faith, enthusiasm, and active participation of young people and the local Churches.”

The Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue is bringing together Christian and Confucian leaders and scholars to explore how the two traditions can help build a more just, peaceful and humane world.

Christian and Confucian religious leaders, scholars, and representatives are gathering at Sogang University in Seoul on August 4-5 for the first Christian–Confucian Colloquium.

The event is organized by the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue in collaboration with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea, Sogang University, and the Korean Confucian Academy.

The colloquium will be held under the theme: “New Heaven, New Earth and Datong (Great Harmony, Great Unity): Christian–Confucian Dialogue for Building an Ideal Society.”

Participants will explore how Christianity and Confucianism can jointly inspire responses to some of the most urgent challenges facing society today.

The press release noted that the two traditions are rooted in distinct theological and philosophical foundations.

However, it added, the two religious traditions share a concern for human dignity, moral integrity, responsible leadership, and the common good.

Discussions will focus particularly on social fragmentation, moral uncertainty, environmental degradation, and threats to peace.

The press release said the colloquium is expected to wrap up with a call for continued Christian–Confucian cooperation in the fields of education, ethical formation, and peace building.

Organizers hope the meeting will mark the beginning of a lasting tradition of dialogue between followers of Christianity and Confucianism.