Skulls and other remains of massacred tribespeople used in the colonial era for experiments to push claims of European racial superiority were handed over by Germany to Namibia at a church ceremony in Berlin.

In what historians call the first genocide of the 20th century, soldiers of German Kaiser Wilhelm slaughtered some 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama tribespeople in a 1904-08 campaign after a revolt against land seizures by German colonists.

At Wednesday’s ceremony, a Namibian delegation received the skulls and bones from German Foreign Ministry representatives. They will be taken to the Namibian capital Windhoek on Aug. 31 where rituals will be carried out.

“Today, we want to do what should have been done many years ago – to give back to their descendants the remains of people who became victims of the first genocide of the 20th century,” said Petra Bosse-Huber, a German Protestant bishop.

Namibian Education Minister Katrina Hanse-Himarwa said last week that the government would create a group to decide whether to bury or display the repatriated skulls that had been kept in German museums.

Germany has acknowledged “moral responsibility” for the killings but to avoid compensation claims, has avoided making an official apology for the massacres.

Esther Utjiua Muinjangue, chairwoman of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, said the handover ceremony would have been the perfect opportunity for Germany to officially apologise.

“Is that asking too much? I don’t think so,” she told reporters in Berlin earlier this week.

Ignored for decades, Germany’s colonial history is drawing increasing attention. A couple of years ago, the German Historical Museum curated a big exhibition on the subject.

Germany, which lost all its colonial territories after World War One, was the third biggest colonial power after Britain and France, which lost theirs after World War Two.

During its 1904-08 campaign in what was then German South West Africa, the German Reich sent reinforcements to put down an uprising by tribespeople over their expulsion from their land and recruitment into forced labour. The Hereros had killed 123 German traders, settlers and soldiers.

In addition to the slaughter, thousands of Hereros were driven into the desert and died of thirst and starvation, and the rest were sent to concentration camps.

Legal representatives for the Herero and Nama people have brought a lawsuit against Germany in New York over genocide and property seizure carried out by German colonists.

The German government has entered negotiations with the Namibian government over possible reparations for the genocide but the lawsuit argues that Germany violated international law on the rights of indigenous peoples.

A New Mexico judge received death threats and Islamophobic abuse on Tuesday a day after she granted bail to five Muslims charged with child abuse and accused of training children at their compound to carry out attacks, court officials said.

Police raided the compound in Taos County on Aug. 3 following a tip-off that children held there were starving. They found 11 children in need of food and water, and three days later unearthed the body of a toddler.

In an order published on Tuesday, district Judge Sarah Backus said prosecutors had produced evidence that was “troubling and unusual” but failed to show the defendants abused the children and were a threat to society if released on bail.

One caller on Tuesday told Backus “her throat would be slit” while another said he wished “someone would smash her head,” New Mexico courts spokesman Barry Massey said.

Backus was bombarded with abuse and criticism on Twitter, and received hundreds of calls and emails, most of which referred to her using terms like “Islamic terrorism sympathizer”, Massey said.

Backus closed her court and the Taos County courthouse went into lockdown after threats of violence against all staff.

Prosecutors alleged the dead toddler was a severely ill boy abducted from Georgia by his father, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the son of a prominent New York imam. Prosecutors said the boy died at the compound in February as Ibn Wahhaj tried to heal him through prayer.

Prosecutors allege Wahhaj gave firearms training to two teenage boys at the compound to attack “corrupt institutions.”

New Mexico’s Republican Governor Susana Martinez slammed Backus’ bail decision in a statement, saying the state’s Supreme Court had been “dictating pretrial release for all kinds of dangerous criminals.”

The five defendants – two men, their wives and a sister – must wear GPS ankle bracelets once released on $20,000 bail each and are not allowed back to the compound, Backus ruled.

DIVIDED COMMUNITY

Their 11 children are in protective care and the defendants may visit them once released, Backus said.

The case has split the Taos County community between those who believe the group was involved in a failed attempt to live “off the grid,” and others who fear they were hatching a plot to attack schools, banks and police, as prosecutors alleged.

“There’s a murderer in the bunch,” said Larry Salazar, 67, a rancher who lives about 2 miles from the high-desert compound. “What are we going to do to protect ourselves? Where are they going to be going to?”.

Another resident, named Quincy, who requested his full name not be used, said he didn’t think the defendants were dangerous, “especially when they came in here using their real names and introduced themselves to every possible person who was their neighbour.”

Ibn Wahhaj has not entered a plea but the other four adults have plead not guilty. Wahhaj must remain in custody as he still faces a Georgia arrest warrant for the abduction of his son.

Ibn Wahhaj’s wife Jany Leveille, 35, from Haiti, was taken into custody by immigration officials on Tuesday, according to the Taos County Sheriff’s Office.

Ethiopia has released thousands of prisoners as a new prime minister reverses decades of security abuses. No-one knows how many were tortured.

But some of those torture victims are now talking openly – to the media, to their relatives and to their friends – about what happened to them after they were jailed, in many cases for protesting against the government.

Their stories raise a hard question for the government: how will it address the injustices committed by security forces behind prison walls?

Since coming to power in April, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, 41, has made peace with Eritrea, ended a state of emergency, freed political prisoners and announced plans to sell shares in state-owned firms to promote growth and create jobs.

Abiy acknowledges that many prisoners suffered abuses, which he has denounced as acts of “state terrorism”.

He has not, however, announced plans to investigate abuses committed by the security forces or set up a process for victims to seek redress. But he has preached forgiveness.

“I call on us all to forgive each other from our hearts. To close the chapters from yesterday, and to forge ahead to the next bright future through national consensus,” Abiy said in his inaugural address.

Rights groups that have documented the torture – from psychological torment to the use of water and ceiling hooks – say there must now be a greater focus on justice.

“Despite all the reforms, there have yet to be any detailed commitments regarding investigations into abuses or justice for victims,” said Maria Burnett of Human Rights Watch.

Since late 2015, when protests against ethnic marginalisation and inequality began, tens of thousands of people were detained, according to Human Rights Watch.

The attorney general’s office and government spokesman Ahmed Shide did not respond to calls and messages requesting comment.

“WE NEED HELP”

Those who spent years imprisoned and were recently released say they are cautiously hopeful.

“I never expected such changes were possible as long as the EPRDF (ruling coalition) remained in power. But even now we don’t know what will come of all this,” said Keyfalew Tefera, 33, who says his legs were amputated in a prison hospital after security forces shot him in 2006 when he was passing by a student protest.

Keyfalew, who studied plant science before he was detained, says his suffering should not be forgotten.

“I’m still a prisoner. I left half my body in there, I have no legs,” he said, in an interview in a friend’s living room. His mother and father died during his 12 years in prison. “I don’t consider myself free.”

Another former prisoner, Mesfin Etana, 43, spent 16 years behind bars for alleged membership in the Oromo Liberation Front, a group removed from the government’s banned list of “terrorist” groups in June.

No evidence against him was produced by authorities, he said, but after six years in prison, a court gave him a life sentence.

He told Reuters that he was repeatedly stripped naked and sexually humiliated by warders during a five-month stint at Maekelawi, a detention centre shut down after Abiy took office.

He cannot afford treatment for health problems that are mainly related to torture. It is not only physical injuries he is confronting.

Before Mesfin’s arrest in 2002, he was a trader and shop owner and was preparing to marry his fiancée Zinash.

He was released on July 4. One of the first things he did was call Zinash, to find she had married another man at her family’s insistence.

“It was very sad,” he said of their conversation.

He was happy to be alive, but without earnings from his business, his family had fallen into poverty.

“We don’t want revenge, but we need help,” he said.

“We would be happy if the government returned what we used to have,” he said, adding that he felt justice was important to prevent the country from “going backward”.

PAST CRIMES

Due process for victims will require overhauling the institutions that failed Ethiopians in the past, some argue.

“A lot of work needs to be done because the judiciary has been disgraced,” said lawyer Wondimu Ebsa, who represented hundreds of prisoners and opposition leaders in trials he decried as a mockery of justice.

Many of his clients have been freed but they are struggling.

“They don’t have money for food, they can’t get work,” he said. “So many of them are living in worse conditions than they were in prison.”

Ethiopia’s constitution requires the state to compensate torture victims, he said, because the government failed to protect them from harm.

Concerns that past crimes may be papered over were raised by an encounter in Zimbabwe earlier this month that went viral on social media.

Former prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn, who resigned in February and was in Harare observing elections, met Ethiopia’s exiled former Marxist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam.

During Mengistu’s 17 years in power, millions of Ethiopians died of famine amid “Red Terror” purges. In 2007, he was sentenced in absentia to life in prison, but Zimbabwe declined to extradite him.

“This photo (of Hailemariam and Mengistu) … is confounding,” Ethiopian law professor Awol Allo wrote on Twitter. “It is fantastic that our government is talking about love, forgiveness and reconciliation but does that mean we are prepared to give a free-for-all, no-questions-asked, amnesty?”

The Roman Catholic Church formally changed its teaching on Thursday to declare the death penalty inadmissible whatever the circumstance, a move likely to be criticised in countries where capital punishment is legal.

The 1.2 billion-member Catholic Church had for centuries allowed the death penalty in extreme cases, but the position began to change under Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005.

The Vatican said the change to its universal catechism, a summary of Church teaching, reflected Pope Francis’ total opposition to capital punishment.

According to the new entry in the catechism: “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

The Church was working “with determination” for the abolition of the death penalty worldwide, the new teaching says.

The new provision is likely to run into stiff opposition from conservative Catholics in the United States and other countries where capital punishment is legal and many believers support it.

Last year, 53 countries issued death sentences and 23 of them executed at least 993 people, according to Amnesty International, with most executions in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.

In the United States, 23 people were executed, a slight increase from 2016 but a low number compared to historical trends, Amnesty said, adding that it was the only country in the Americas that carried out executions.

Capital punishment is banned in most of Europe, with Belarus the only European country that carried out executions last year, Amnesty said. By the end of last year, 106 countries worldwide had banned the death penalty.

Recourse to the death penalty, following a fair trial, had long been “an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good,” the new catechism says.

“Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes,” it says, adding: “more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”

In a letter to bishops, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which enacted the change, said it was aimed at encouraging “the creation of conditions that allow for the elimination of the death penalty where it is still in effect”.