Lawyers in London, Barcelona and Paris acting for three detained Catalan independence leaders have appealed to the United Nations, claiming the men are unlawfully imprisoned.Submissions have been presented to the UN working group on arbitrary detention, asking it to intervene in the cases of the ousted vice-president, Oriol Junqueras, and the Catalan civil society group chiefs Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez.Any determination made by the body, which meets in Geneva, will not be binding on Spanish courts, but will be a signal of international disapproval.

Two years ago, the working group declared that Julian Assange, who remains in Ecuador’s London embassy, was being “arbitrarily detained”.

Cuixart is president of Òmnium Cultural and Sànchez is a former president of the influential Catalan national assembly. They were arrested in October after the independence referendum, while Junqueras was detained early the following month. They have been in prison since then.(theguardian)…[+]

A French mountaineer rescued from Pakistan’s “Killer Mountain” has described how she was forced to abandon her weak climbing partner, descend alone in darkness and wait more than 24 hours for help while suffering altitude-induced hallucinations that made her take a shoe off in freezing conditions.

Elisabeth Revol, 37, returned to France after she was rescued on Sunday from Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest peak at 8,126 metres. She is being treated in a hospital in the Haute-Savoie region, where doctors are assessing whether she will require amputations because of frostbite in her hands and left foot. In an interview with Agence France-Presse she recalled how rescuers urged her to leave her weak and bleeding fellow climber, the Polish mountaineer Tomek Mackiewicz, behind – something she had called “terrible and painful.” Rescuers were unable to reach Mackiewicz, a father of three, who had made six previous winter attempts to scale Nanga Parbat. There is almost no chance of him being found alive.(theguardian)…[+]

Israel is developing archaeological and tourism sites to legitimise illegal settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, European Union diplomats in the city have warned. A leaked report acquired by the Guardian cited projects in parts of East Jerusalem – occupied by Israel since 1967 – that are being used “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimise and expand settlements”.

The report identified settler-run excavation sites in the heart of majority-Arab districts, a proposed cable car project with stops on confiscated land and the designation of built-up urban areas as national parks. “East Jerusalem is the only place where Israeli national parks are declared on populated neighbourhoods,” the report said. The document, a report written annually by the EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem, presented a bleak picture, saying the overall situation in the city and the prospects for peace had worsened. Marginalisation of Palestinians, who comprise about 37% of the city’s residents, continued unabated, with more than 130 building demolitions and the displacement of 228 people, it said.(theguardian)…[+]