Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

It's no surprise that the global economy tanked with the first wave of lockdowns last

year. But as the world has adjusted, the economic hit of further restrictions hasn't been

as deep. The bad news, that's partly because people are moving around more freely.

And it's a tricky time to be a field rat in Cambodia. They've long been a delicacy in

neighboring Vietnam, so when jobs dried up, many Cambodians took to rat catching as a

way to make ends meet. But murine money making isn't as easy as it once was.

Next up though.

Today the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch publishes its annual report into human rights

practices around the globe. It's sobering reading with a roll call of hundreds of abuses

from the murder of journalists in Honduras to the persecution of weaker Muslims in China

to a litany of war crimes in Yemen and Syria. Bringing the perpetrators of these atrocities

to justice has never been easy. Global powers wrangle over who can be prosecuted where, meaning

that big transnational tribunals like the International Criminal Court in the Hague are

often hamstrung. But there is a ray of light, a new, more flexible way of prosecuting

war criminals that's gaining ground particularly in Europe.

There's a very interesting trial going on in the little German town of Koblenz in a case

against a Syrian policeman called Anwar Raslan who is accused of torturing no fewer than

4,000 people in Syria and murdering at least 58 of them.

Zan Smiley is the economist's editor at large.

This is an unusual case because it's being held under German law rather than in an international

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