WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) - A U.S. review found no evidence of human rights violations by Ukraine's Azov Brigade, paving the way for it to use American training and weapons, the State Department said on Tuesday, citing Russian disinformation aimed at discrediting the unit. U.S. law bars foreign security forces from U.S. military assistance if they have committed gross violations of human rights, but a review of the National Guard of Ukraine's 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade cleared them for U.S. funds, the department said in a statement.

"After thorough review, Ukraine’s 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade passed Leahy vetting as carried out by the U.S. Department of State," the department wrote, referring to the Leahy Law. The move allows the Biden administration to reverse a decade-old ban on allowing the Ukrainian military unit to use U.S. weapons, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the decision.

The U.S. has added three more companies to an entity list that bars imports from firms allegedly involved with Uyghur forced labor in China, according to a U.S. government notice posted online on Tuesday. The latest targets include shoe manufacturer Dongguan Oasis Shoes Co, electrolytic aluminum maker Xinjiang Shenhuo Coal and Electricity Co and food processor Shandong Meijia Group Co, also known as Rizhao Meijia Group, the notice from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said.

The announcement by the head of the Republicans was a historic break with his party’s policy. Top politicians on the right have called for him to step down, bringing the party to the brink of implosion.

Manal al-Wakeel and her extended family of 30 people thought they were going home.

Displaced from their home in Gaza City months ago, Ms. al-Wakeel and relatives began packing their bags on Monday and preparing to dismantle their tent in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas had announced that it had accepted a cease-fire proposal from Qatar and Egypt, leaving many Gazans thinking that a truce was imminent. Their joy was short-lived; it soon became clear that Hamas was not talking about the same proposal endorsed days earlier by Israel, which said the two sides remained far apart.

Eight countries joined the U.S. in opposing the UN’s latest resolution to allow Palestine to qualify to become a full UN member.

The United Nations General Assembly backed the Palestinian bid to be eligible for a full UN membership on Friday, with 143 countries voting in favor, 25 abstaining and nine voting against.

Those nine countries that opposed the Palestinian recognition to join the international body are the U.S., Israel, Argentina, Czech Republic, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Hungary and Papua New Guinea.

AMSTERDAM, May 10 (Reuters) - South Africa has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to order Israel to withdraw from Rafah as part of additional emergency measures over the war in Gaza, the U.N.'s top court said on Friday. In the ongoing case brought by South Africa, which accuses Israel of acts of genocide against Palestinians, the World Court in January ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the Genocide Convention and to ensure its troops commit no genocidal acts against Palestinians.

The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is visiting Ukraine on Friday to meet his counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as the UK announced it would provide further military aid to the country over the coming year.

The UK has been one of Kyiv’s staunchest supporters since Russia’s invasion and Sunak said Britain would boost its support in the next financial year to £2.5bn, an increase of £200m on the previous two years.

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Despite its last-minute scheduling, the meeting at a bookstore in Russia’s westernmost city of Kaliningrad still drew about 60 people, with many outraged by a lawmaker’s efforts to ban abortions in local private clinics.

The weeknight turnout surprised and heartened Dasha Yakovleva, one of the organizers, amid recent crackdowns on political activism under President Vladimir Putin.

“Right now, there is no room for political action in Russia. The only place left is our kitchens,” Yakovleva, co-founder of the Feminitive Community women’s group, told The Associated Press. “And here, it was a public place, well-known in Kaliningrad, and everyone spoke out openly about how they see this measure, why they think it’s unjustified, inappropriate.”

Although abortion is still legal and widely available in Russia, recent attempts to restrict it have touched a nerve across the increasingly conservative country. Activists are urging supporters to make official complaints, circulating online petitions and even staging small protests.

When leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa meet this week, many observers may ask: Could this group of countries challenge the US and West?

Before the summit, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa described “a common desire to have a more balanced global order” and said, “We will not be drawn into a contest between global powers.”

The five countries constitute BRICS. It’s not a formal alliance, but instead an informal group largely focused on economics. Leaders of the BRICS countries meet annually and a decade ago established their own development bank. But due to their own differences and in the face of a largely US-run global financial system, their efforts have been in many ways symbolic.

Still, that symbolism is potent. As many as 40 countries want to join BRICS, according to South Africa’s 2023 summit chair. At a particularly tense political moment as the West lines up to support Ukraine against Russia, and as the US and China escalate a new Cold War in the making, many countries are seeking alternatives.

Some scholars see echoes of the Non-Aligned Movement. During the Cold War, Asian and African countries met in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 to forge an organization that sought to transcend US-Soviet competition.

“This is Bandung all over again,” says Patrick Heller, a sociologist at Brown University. “There is still a really strong sort of anti-colonial reflex in all these countries, that Europe and the US have dominated everything for as long as anyone can remember.”

Yet a reversal of that domination is a long way off. Each of the BRICS countries is experiencing economic slowdowns; and unlike the Non-Aligned Movement, the five countries don’t seem to represent more than a sum of their parts ideologically or politically. But if the parts could come together, it would really be something: more than 3 billion people in those countries alone.

The summit is unlikely to provide that clear vision. Not just because the divisions between Russia and China, and India and China, run deep. The paradox may be that the BRICS won’t be able to unite over a shared agenda as Russia’s war on Ukraine continues. (Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t attend the summit because South Africa is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, where Putin faces charges of alleged war crimes for the Ukraine invasion.) With Russia at war in Europe, and China effectively in a cold war with the US, the BRICS format becomes less of an alternative third vision for the world, and more a way for each US adversary to shore up friendships with middle powers.

BRICS vision for a different type of world order is as of yet not on offer — but there’s a desire for one. And that’s a reality that the Biden administration must reckon with.

In 2001, Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined an acronym of Brazil, Russia, India, and China — BRICs. At the time, the four economies comprised only 8 percent of the global economy, but were rising rapidly. O’Neill wrote that they offered investment opportunities and their growth posed serious questions about global governance. “Over the next 10 years, the weight of the BRICs and especially China in world GDP will grow, raising important issues about the global economic impact of fiscal and monetary policy in the BRICs,” O’Neill wrote.

It is also a time capsule of a different moment: with China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 and before Xi Jinping took high office, a US consensus suggested that economic growth would lead China toward democratization. Back then, however difficult it might be to conceptualize today, Russia under Putin represented hope, too.

The grouping began to meet annually, and South Africa joined in 2010 — officially making the group BRICS, big S. The BRICS gained new appeal, especially after the 2008-2009 financial crisis that originated in the US housing market and in European contexts, but quickly damaged economies in the Global South.

Today, the five countries are on uneven economic ground: While the countries’ share of the global economy has grown over the last two decades — now making up more than the G7 group of advanced economies — they’ve developed at decidedly different rates.

Could the BRICS countries compete with the G7 though? Heller noted that there are things uniting the G7: They are all democracies, which makes it easier for the countries to coordinate and communicate; they are all large, developed economies; and the G7 still dominates the global governance institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and even patent agreements, which means that these countries have huge advantages within the international financial and economic system.

Experts say that BRICS countries are concerned about their sovereignty and lack of representation in international institutions. They seek alternative centers of finance, harbor resentment for the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, and seek a world that is not run by the US dollar, which they see as a coercive instrument.

But even as the BRICS countries push for international governance institutions where they have more of a say, internal dynamics and economic trends in the countries may inhibit the potential for unity.

Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a progressive democrat, but the country is also recovering from its own January 6-style attack on its capital earlier this year and repairing the isolationist foreign policy of predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. Russia wages a war against Ukraine that, beyond the moral bankruptcy of it all, has tanked its own economy. US-led sanctions on Russia have shaken the economy, and pushed Russia to pursue alternatives to the US dollar. For its part, India also is experiencing democratic decline, and despite that the Biden administration embraces Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India’s relations with Russia and China are complicated, to the point that it’s difficult to imagine them all agreeing on much. Meanwhile, China’s economy is struggling even as it seeks geopolitical friendships, as competition with the United States becomes a new organizing principle for the world. And then South Africa, whose leading diplomats have overtly called for a new non-aligned movement, is also facing economic and democracy woes.

O’Neill recalled in a recent TV interview how he came up with the BRICs paper for Goldman Sachs by reflecting how much of the world has become sick of “Americanization of the world” and that countries like China needed a bigger role in global governance.

“It led me to think we need to somehow develop a world in which different philosophies, different cultures, different political beliefs and regimes can somehow coexist,” he said. “My god, we haven’t really got very far in 22 years.”

BRICS is not cohesive enough to provide an alternative to the US-led global economy and the enduring supremacy of the US dollar. But by raising important issues in this summit, the BRICS countries show they may over time create leverage.

Much of the focus in recent weeks has been around the dozens of countries that want to join the bloc. Expansion is unlikely to happen any time soon; for one, India and Brazil are cautious about adding new members, perhaps because it would dilute their influence. But the fact that so many countries want to join the grouping is important in and of itself.

Another item that many observers are closely following is the prospect of a shared currency for BRICS. Realistically, the establishment of a new currency would take years, and reports say that the topic isn’t even formally on the leaders’ agenda this week in South Africa. But as with enlargement, it’s telling that so many journalists and analysts have discussed it in the lead-up to the summit. It shows the extreme wariness some countries have of the US dollar at a time when US-led sanctions have had punishing effects and surprising knock-on effects, though the US will prevail over the international financial scene for some time.

More practical, then, is the New Development Bank, the BRICS answer to the World Bank. Its relatively small $50 billion of subscribed capital is about half of what the World Bank commits to annually. Still, Saudi Arabia wants to join. Egypt, Bangladesh, and the United Arab Emirates are members of the New Development Bank.

“There is consensus on the fact that the global order needs to change, needs to be more balanced, whether it is through the reform of the current institutions or through the creation of new ones,” says Aude Darnal, a researcher at the Stimson Center.

Speaking at the United Nations last year, President Biden called for the reform of the UN Security Council. “The time has come for this institution to become more inclusive,” he said, and US diplomats are reportedly following up, but the shape of such changes remains unclear.

The ongoing tensions between the US and China across multiple arenas might have more of an impact on the international economy and politics than what BRICS comes up with at this summit.

The US is doubling down on its close Asia partners to counter China. Just days before the BRICS summit, President Joe Biden hosted the leaders of Japan and South Korea for an extraordinary meeting at Camp David. And now China is meeting with its informal partners as dozens of countries clamor to join BRICS. China needs allies, and does not have natural and well-developed partners, so BRICS may ultimately present an opportunity.

BRICS countries are “consistent with a line that the Global South is rising and needs to be heard from, and has its imperatives and interests,” said Derek Mitchell, who worked as a senior Asia adviser and ambassador during the Obama administration and is now the president of the National Democratic Institute. “And China wants to lead that, and I would imagine that India will have a problem with China leading that, just the way the Soviets had a problem with that during the old Cold War days when they were fighting for leadership of the Third World.”

That helps explain why the Biden administration has sought to draw India closer, feting Modi with a state dinner this summer. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June that the US is “deeply engaged with its leading members,” emphasizing Biden’s contacts with Lula and Modi.

Yet the United States has played down the significance of BRICS — a move that could be shortsighted. For Darnal, the interest of dozens of Global South countries in joining BRICS is a major global indicator of where things go from here. “It would be a mistake to simply overlook that and simply say, well, they will not achieve anything,” she told me.

The lives of Kobra, Najia, Madina, Sonya and Zahra looked as though they were just getting started two years ago. When the Taliban captured the Afghan capital of Kabul, they were about to finish school, working towards a university degree or beginning a career. Suddenly, though, their lives changed dramatically.

The five Afghan women between the ages of 14 and 29 all belong to less privileged layers of society and were the beneficiaries of the relatively liberal laws and new educational opportunities that existed in the republic. But all that came to an end with the Taliban victory.

Through email and video interviews, they spoke with DER SPIEGEL about what has become of their lives in the two years since the country’s new rulers have pushed women out of public life. They speak of the end of their dreams, depression, economic struggle, disappointment with the West and their fury with the Taliban. And they also write about what the West and the security forces of the toppled republic were unable to provide, but the Taliban can: Security

Kobra, 29, was a teacher at a private school in Kabul. She has been unemployed for almost two years. She was the family’s only breadwinner. The father of the family left her mother early on. They are from the central Afghanistan province of Bamyan.

Najia, 14, former high school student. Currently lives with her mother and sister, Kobra, in the home of an uncle in Kabul.

Madina, 23, was pursuing a degree in economics in Kabul until the Taliban closed universities to women last December. Today, she is unemployed and lives with seven siblings in the capital.

Sonya, 23, studied engineering in Harat. She was forced to leave the university in her fourth year, shortly before completing her studies. Currently, Sonya is doing an internship with a construction company. She lives with her parents in a small rental house.

Zahra, 24, is unemployed. She studied literature in the eastern province of Khost and taught at a private school in the capital. A few days ago, she found a job with an aid organization in Kabul. Her dream is to become an author

Kobra

You, who call yourself students of religion, Taliban – are you aware that the Islam revelations begin with "Read!”? This applies to both men and women. You have transformed our faith into an anti-religion!

The Prophet calls on us to strive for knowledge, and He doesn’t differentiate between the sexes, but you prohibit us from learning. If the education of girls were forbidden in Islam, then why does it exist in every single other Muslim country?

Why have you closed higher level schools to girls? Why have you taken our voices? Why have you robbed us of the freedom to go outside? What crime is it to express one’s thoughts? But you don’t want us to speak about our oppression!

The world was made for all humans. God gave us the ability to discover nature, use our voice, to see, to travel. Why have you taken away our right to work? You have brought poverty and death into our homes. You yourself are in opposition to God. You are keeping us in prison. And you claim to be the real Muslims?

Madina

There are seven of us in the house. My brother used to work as an IT specialist at a tech company, and my sister was a teacher. Together, we earned $400 per month and we were doing well. After the fall of the republic, my brother and sister both lost their jobs. Now, my older sister teaches online. A foreign aid organization pays her $200 per month. That’s what we live on.

She's my great role model. I want to become a courageous woman like her. Before the Taliban arrived, she fulfilled as many of our wishes as she could with her salary. She bought us clothes for religious festivals or parties. I want to do the same. But the Taliban have bound our hands and feet. My head hurts. What will become of us? I just want to curl up alone in a corner and cry.

Sonya

A few years before the Taliban toppled the republic, I had an experience that completely changed my life. I was washing the dishes in the kitchen when a TV moderator started interviewing a woman who had earned her diploma at Mehri Heravi High School in Herat and then studied construction engineering at Herat University. I looked up in surprise. The woman was married and had two children, and she was presented as a successful construction engineer. She had achieved everything, she had made the impossible possible! And as she talked about all the difficulties she had overcome, I felt a positive energy flowing through me. "You see how the strength and the ambition of an Afghan woman can break through all the walls of limitations?" I called out in excitement to my brother. On that day, I made my decision. Like this woman, I wanted to study engineering. I enrolled; I had a single goal. I loved what I was doing and made it all the way to my fourth year at university. I wanted to go on to study physics, get to know new countries and travel to space. But then, the Taliban arrived and closed the universities to us women. I tried to get around the ban and enrolled in a drawing course. But it was cancelled. I tried again, I wanted to learn English. But there are no longer any English courses for women in Herat.

Why do the Taliban stand in the way of women’s advancement and their presence in society? It’s because they are afraid that women’s knowledge will limit their power.

Kobra

Qari Hamdallah, yes, I mean you. The one who, every time I leave the house, is standing at the intersection in front of the bus stop and examining the women with those piercing eyes to see if they are obeying. You yell at the drivers if they transport men and women in the same cars. You shove your guard-dog eyes through the car window to examine our clothing. Your gaze feels like a bucket of cold water over my head. I have no male escort, but I leave the house anyway.

Your arrival in Kabul transformed my dreams into nightmares.

Do you know how much effort it took to get to where I was? I studied day and night for the entrance exams for the public university in my favorite city Kabul. My mother is illiterate. We lived in Bamyan and moved to the capital. I was able to earn enough money for the entire family. We weren’t a burden on anyone. Later, as a teacher in a private school, I taught both boys and girls from the seventh to the 12th grade. My sister went to a school for English and painting. I fulfilled my mother’s wishes. We lived in a small house. We were happy.

Since my childhood, you have forced your way into my life with your suicide attacks, or when you would set fire to our schools and mosques. I am a Shiite Muslim. Even as a child, I knew that the Sunni Taliban were the enemies of women and girls. When I used to travel from Kabul to Bamyan, I would cross Shahr Square, which was so frequently the target of your atrocities. Sometimes, the street was still bloody after yet another one of your attacks.

Qari Hamdallah, you who are standing everyday at the bus stop at the intersection: Do you actually know what you have inflicted upon me?

With your arrival, our lives darkened. On the day you came, I ran home from the school, and everything changed. Girls were no longer allowed to learn, I lost my job. You slammed shut the doors of my life. Now, I sit at home, waiting for my uncle to give me a bit of money. We have sold my mother’s jewelry because we had no more bread to eat. I hate asking other people for money.

In the years of the republic, there was less security. But it was still the best time of our lives. Because we were free.

Madina

On the order of the supreme leader of the Islamic Emirate, the beauty salons in Kabul and the provinces were closed down. The last hairdresser we went to was the one at Makroyan Market back in April. I wanted to get my hair done for Eid al-Fitr, the fast-breaking festival. All of the women there had bitter stories to tell – about the unemployment of their husbands, children and brothers. My mother, too, lamented the fact that my father and brother were jobless.

The owner of the salon was concerned. She was the breadwinner for her family. Her husband had died of cancer several years previously and she has two sons and four daughters. "How can feed my children and pay our high rent if the Taliban decide to close down the salons in Kabul?” she wanted to know. They had already been banned in some of the provinces. Now, the capital has also met the same fate.

Being beautiful is not a sin! God is beautiful and God loves beauty. Allah tells us to wear clean, orderly and beautiful clothes for Him, and to be beautiful for Him. Being beautiful does not mean that women are bad or tainted.

When women are sad, they can improve their spirits by putting on makeup. Looking nice is not a crime. Working in salons were among the last jobs available to women.

Sonya

What would it look like if God had created everything without color? Would you still want to see? What would then be the difference between the forest and the desert? Between a blue sky and a cloudy one?

With the closing of the beauty salons and the ban on makeup, the Taliban robbed Afghan women of color. Beauty gives us composure. Some even try to hide their spiritual wounds with makeup. With the ban, the Taliban erased color from women’s faces and washed away the fragrance that surrounded them. The Taliban make women feel like they are dead. But we are still alive.

The Taliban see us women as the source of sin and corruption. If they succumb to lust, it is a sin that in their eyes stems from the freedom and beauty of women. If women were allowed to walk around freely, then the Taliban, who see themselves as the true Muslims, might commit sins because they feel attracted to these women. Isn’t it interesting that those who clearly aren’t able to control their own desires and moods claim that they are able to rule an entire country?

Madina

Freedom also had a price. When we used to walk into the center of Kabul – to Maryam High School, Pamir Cinema or to shop at the Makroyan Market – we would often encounter men with poor manners. They had nothing better to do than harass us. In crowded buses, they would touch our bodies. They would say obscene things, stick their telephone numbers in the folds of our robes or let their notes fall to our feet for us to pick up. Now that the Taliban are here, that no longer happens. Men on the streets now behave themselves. Because it’s not just the women who are afraid of the Taliban, the men fear them too.

I am grateful to the Taliban for some things. There are now seats for women on the bus. And they have regulated food prices. Some things had grown so expensive that we were only able to eat rice and beans for months on end. Now, we can buy meat every two or three weeks. There, they have done well. But why don’t they use their power for the benefit of everybody?

Najia

It was the 10th day of the month of Muharram. After I had breakfasted and cleaned the house, my mother, my sister Kobra and I went to the mosque. Armed Taliban police were there to secure the mosque. For as long as I can remember, we Hazara, as Shiite Muslims, have been the target of the deadliest Taliban attacks. How strange, I thought: Only two years ago, these same Taliban killed thousands of innocent Shiites with their attacks on schools and mosques. And now they have come to protect us?

How can we trust them? In the eyes of the Taliban, we are nothing but infidels. Worthless, without rights. The world should know that us girls start every day here with desperation. There is nobody we can tell about our pain, and nobody who wants to hear it.

Kobra

Families where there is no man are being denied their existence by your laws. We are one such family. How are we supposed to earn our bread? Show me the religion where it is said that people should live in poverty and sell their organs and their children to feed themselves? All that is happening here in your empire.

Madina

After the collapse of the republic, classes continued at the university for a few weeks. At first, the Taliban claimed that classes would continue. They set up divides between the male and female students and there were also so-called culture classes. The instructor would ask about surahs from the Koran and threatened that those who couldn’t recite them by heart would be thrown out of the second story window. I trembled. Fear became my constant companion.

Taking away our right to education and work is like forbidding us from eating and breathing. It kills the human soul and destroys society. It’s like cutting through the roots of civilization.

Zahra

Where are you today who spent all those years living with us here? You diplomats and politicians, as you were called by the powers of the world, the so-called international community? You are silent, as if Afghanistan was no longer part of the world and there were no longer any humans here.

I am furious at you international media, you journalists, who are now silent. You limited your coverage to the initial days after the Taliban takeover, and now – now that we are under much greater strain – you have left us alone.

I am furious at you Taliban, who are inflicting such damage on your country. At you who lack even a shred of humanity. I don’t know where you learned your ruthless recipes, which cannot be found in any book.

I am furious at you, the man who calls himself our father, Ashraf Ghani, the president who left the Afghans behind with no protection. It is now easy for the Taliban to oppress the people in this forgotten country, to steal the girls and force them into marriage. And we, those who remain here, continue to water the flowers of our hope so they do not wilt.

Madina

When the Taliban hear music coming from our yard, they storm the party, beat up the DJ and claim that music is haram, forbidden. Female athletes are no longer allowed to take part in competitions. Women and girls may no longer participate in art exhibits. When we demonstrated for our rights, they met us with tear gas, clubs and water cannons. I don’t know which is greater: My hatred for the Taliban, because they took all that away from us, or my anger at the imagination with which they did it.

Sonya

Woman can do many different things at the same time. They can be a good mother, a good wife, a good sister and be an engineer, politician or astronaut at the same time, all those things that men are able to do. But the Taliban don’t want to share power with the other half of society. They know: An increase of power for women means a decrease of their own. That's the real reason they define women as creatures that have no needs of their own.

They only want women around to serve their pleasure and take care of other needs. Now, though, they are unexpectedly encountering women in Afghan cities who are strong, educated and able. For the Taliban, that is unacceptable.

Some men here say that the real crime the Americans committed here was that of instilling nonsense in the minds of women. And that they are no longer willing to accept the intended fate of an Afghan woman.

The Taliban should know: If they erect walls on the path to our goals, we will become ladders. If they burn the walls, we will become water. If they increase the pressure, we will grow stronger.

The fact that I am still writing proves: I hope, I laugh and I am still moving. And I won’t stop until I get what I want

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2693133

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has been given three-year jail sentence over corruption allegations.

A court in Islamabad found him guilty of not declaring money he had earned from selling state gifts. He denies the charges and says he will appeal.

After the verdict, Mr Khan was taken into custody from his home in Lahore.

The former cricketer, 70, was elected in 2018, but was ousted in a no-confidence vote last year after falling out with Pakistan's powerful military.

Mr Khan is facing more than 100 cases brought against him since his removal - charges he says are politically motivated.

Saturday's verdict centred on charges that he incorrectly declared details of presents from foreign dignitaries and proceeds from their alleged sale.

The gifts - reported to be worth more than 140 million Pakistani rupees ($635,000) - included Rolex watches, a ring and a pair of cuff links.

Mr Khan's barrister Gohar Khan said the verdict was "a murder of justice".

"We weren't even given a chance. We weren't even allowed to cross [examine], to say anything in defence or conduct our arguments. I haven't seen this kind of injustice before," he told Dawn newspaper.

As the court decision was announced, a crowd, which included some prosecuting lawyers, began chanting "Imran Khan is a thief" outside the building.

His party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, confirmed to the BBC that after being arrested in Lahore, Mr Khan was flown to the capital, Islamabad, to begin serving his sentence.

For months he had avoided arrest, with his supporters at times fighting pitched battles with police to keep him out of custody.

In May, Mr Khan was arrested for not appearing at court as requested. He was then released, with the arrest declared illegal.

Since then, his party has been under intense pressure from the authorities.

Many senior officials have left and thousands of supporters have been arrested, accused of being involved in the protests that followed Mr Khan's arrest.

Pakistan's army plays a prominent role in politics, sometimes seizing power in military coups, and, on other occasions, pulling levers behind the scenes.

Many analysts believe Mr Khan's election win in 2018 happened with the help of the military.

In opposition, he has been one of its most vocal critics, and analysts say the army's popularity has fallen.

Since being ousted, Mr Khan has been campaigning for early elections.

Conviction would disqualify Mr Khan from standing for office, possibly for life.

Pakistan's parliament will be dissolved on August 9, leaving a caretaker government to take over in the run up to the elections.

No election date has been announced, although constitutionally they should take place by early November.