A UN human rights expert on Friday urged the US government to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline out of respect for the rights of affected Native Americans. Earlier this month the North Dakota pipeline’s construction was suspended after the US Departments of Justice, Interior and Army released a joint statement stating [...]

Chelsea Manning, a former US soldier imprisoned for leaking classified documents, was sentenced on Thursday to two weeks of solitary confinement as a punishment for a suicide attempt, as well as for keeping a banned book in her quarters. According to a statement released by Fight for the Furture , an advocacy group supporting Manning, [...]

UN experts condemned Australia Friday for its laws allowing indefinite detention of intellectually disabled persons facing criminal charges. Under the current law, if a person is found unfit to plead to a charge against them, they may be held in custody for an unspecified amount of time. Such prisoners may not come before a court [...]

International human rights groups, including Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) , issued a joint letter on Thursday to the permanent representatives of member and observer states of the UN Human Rights Council urging them “to support the High Commissioner’s call for an international, independent investigation into civilian deaths and injuries in Yemen.” [...]

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday called on the international community to intensify its efforts to protect cultural treasures against enemy combatants in regions devastated by conflict. Ban specifically directed attention to attacks on cultural heritage sites in the Middle East, North Africa, Yemen and Mali among others, and termed such kinds of attacks “war [...]

Advocacy groups on Thursday filed a lawsuit challenging the redrawn boundaries for North Carolina’s congressional seats. Plaintiffs are arguing that the district lines were influenced by politics. Some of the parties involved in the suit are the League of Women Voters and Democratic voters. They claim , unlike previous plaintiffs in similar suits, that they [...]

Human rights groups Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International (AI) and the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies (ACJPS) on Thursday reported that justice still has not been achieved for the victims of the violent protest in Khartoum in September 2013 in which some protesters were killed. Saying that “lthough it seems like Sudan [...]

The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Governor Matt Bevin did not have the authority to unilaterally cut the budget for state universities. The ruling came after a lawsuit was filed by Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear . The 5-2 decision reverses a lower court ruling, which found that Bevin did have the authority to [...]

Independent UN human rights expert Alfred de Zayas said Thursday that “rms deals are a major threat to security, peace and human rights.” De Zayas, the UN Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, explained that the arms deals often bring with them the risk that the weapons will be [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein warned Thursday that conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) will deteriorate unless there is accountability for the atrocities against civilians. Earlier this week there was an attack in Kinshasa that resulted in the deaths of civilians and police officers. Additionally, the commissioner [...]