Youth activists Gloria Senga and Musasa Tshibanda went missing on the evening of 16 December after they met with another youth activist in Kinshasa.

On 7 December the Israeli authorities renewed the administrative detention of Palestinian human rights defender Hasan Ghassan Ghaleb Safadi for an additional six months.

Cuban graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado (‘El Sexto’) has been transferred to another new detention centre where he continues to be detained without charge since his arrest on 26 November.

Bahraini women’s rights activist Ghada Jamsheer was released from prison on 12 December on medical grounds. The court has ordered to serve the remaining four months of her combined 10 month sentence as a community service.

Salar Shadizadi was sentenced to death again in November after a retrial in Iran. He has been on death row since 2007 for a crime committed when he was 15.

Journalist Muhammad Bekzhanov, aged 62, who is scheduled to be released in January after spending more than 17 years in prison on politically motivated charges, has been put in a punishment cell.

An Egyptian court has summarily frozen the assets of human rights defender Azza Soliman and may freeze the assets of three others.

The Dominican Congress adopted a comprehensive reform of the Criminal Code which maintains the criminalization of abortion except where the pregnancy poses a risk to the life of a pregnant woman or girl.

The fate and whereabouts of UK-Bangladeshi national Yasin Talukder remain unknown five months after his enforced disappearance.

Former prison officer and NGO founder Walid Zarrouk is on hunger strike in protest against his 24 November prison sentences for "insulting public officials".