The United Nations Security Council is set to meet Thursday on Ethiopia's mega-dam project, which has sparked fears in downstream Sudan and Egypt over their water supplies, diplomats said.

Both nations have been pushing Ethiopia to ink a binding deal over the filling and operation of its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile that broke ground in 2011.

Addis Ababa, which said it last year reached its first target in the years-long filling of the dam, has announced it will proceed in July with or without a deal.

The public session was requested by Tunisia on Egypt and Sudan's behalf, according to a diplomatic source.

France's ambassador to the UN, Nicolas de Riviere, said last week that the council itself can do little apart from bringing the sides together.

"We can open the door, invite the three countries at the table, bring them to express their concerns, encourage them to get back to the negotiations and find a solution," he told reporters.

Sudan and Egypt have written to the council to urge it to take up the matter in recent weeks.

Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said in his note that negotiations are at an impasse and he accused Ethiopia of adopting "a policy of intransigence that undermined our collective endeavors to reach an agreement."

Egypt, which depends on the Nile for about 97 percent of its irrigation and drinking water, sees the dam as an existential threat.

Sudan hopes the project will regulate annual flooding, but fears its own dams would be harmed without agreement on its operation.

Honduran hydroelectric executive convicted of environmentalist murder
Tegucigalpa (AFP) July 5, 2021 - The general manager of a hydroelectric company in Honduras on Monday became the eighth person convicted in the 2016 murder of a renowned environmentalist.

A judge said Roberto David Castillo, a former member of the armed forces who graduated from the West Point military academy in New York, was the "co-perpetrator of the crime of murder."

The victim, Berta Caceres, was a fervent opponent of the activities of the Desarrollos Energeticos S.A. (DESA) company in indigenous territories in Honduras.

Castillo is due to be sentenced on August 3.

During his trial, the court was shown the content of telephone conversations Castillo had with the other seven people sentenced to between 30 and 50 years in prison over the murder.

The court heard that Caceres was killed due to her opposition to DESA's building of a hydroelectric plant on the Gualcarque river.

She was the coordinator of the COPINH group of indigenous organizations and the winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015.

The decision was "a grain of sand" in the search for justice, said Caceres' daughter Laura Zuniga.

"We feel happy now. The Honduran people are fed up with so much impunity and death," said Zuniga.

Caceres's family and the COPINH leadership want more people punished, though, including the partners in DESA, made up of influential banking families.

Caceres was shot dead on March 2, 2016 by men who entered her home in the western village of La Esperanza.

A Mexican who was in another room of the house was injured.

Castillo was arrested two years later, accused of being the mastermind of the murder.

Prosecutors said Castillo and two other DESA executives, who have already been convicted, hired the assassins that killed Caceres.

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