Six human rights organizations, including Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) , are calling for the next UN Secretary-General to do everything he or she can to protect innocent civilians whose nations face armed conflict. The groups have outlined eight priorities that they believe the next UN Secretary-General must address to protect human [...]
Fully autonomous weapons, as opposed to the current remote-controlled drone weapons, must be internationally prohibited , Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Monday. The report is part of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and is intended for government leaders that are meeting in Geneva this week for the third annual meeting [...]
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has established a new constitutional court that will be inaugurated Monday with the swearing in of the last justice. The court, which will hold supremacy over all others, was quietly created by presidential decree, but those that oppose the creation point out that Abbas stacked the court in his favor by [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Neil Sammonds, a Syria Researcher at Amnesty International, discusses the upcoming negotiations and possible solutions regarding the violence in Syria… The negotiations set to recommence in Geneva on April 11, 2016 and the recent reduction of hostilities in Syria may represent important steps towards a peaceful solution to more than five years [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Dwight Newman of the University of Saskatchewan discusses what is happening with recent leave decisions related to Indigenous rights and Canadian energy regulation…. The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to grant leave to appeal in the Clyde River case means that it will hear an appeal from the Federal Court of Appeal [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Kaimipono Wenger of Thomas Jefferson School of Law, discusses the rise of anti-LGBT bills in a number of conservative states and opposite reactions to these bills and the fundamental question: do LGBT rights create burdens on religion, from which churches and their members should be protected… The past few weeks have seen [...]
A former Serb general suspected of war crimes against Albanian civilians has been detained, police and a Kosovo-based human rights group reported Friday. Behxhet Shala of the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms and police spokesperson Baki Kelani have confirmed that Milovan Bojovic was arrested on Thursday after attempting to illegally cross [...]
A UN human rights expert on Friday called on the international community to put an end to financial secrecy in wake of the recent release of thousands of confidential financial documents known as the “Panama Papers” . UN Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky stated that secrecy revealed by documents [...]
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein on Friday warned about child torture and urged a commitment to end it. At the 43rd session of the Board of Trustees of the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture , Zeid stated, “neither national security nor the fight against terrorism, the threat of [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Friday overturned a district court decision that allowed Google to ignore a subpoena. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood began investigating Google in 2012 for failing to do enough to prevent crime. He issued a 79-page subpoena, but Google refused to produce the requested information, instead [...]
