A Russian judge ruled in a closed pretrial hearing Tuesday that US citizen Paul Whelan will remain in Russian custody until his trial. Whelan has been imprisoned in Russia since December 28, when Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested Whelan on suspicion of espionage while he was allegedly visiting Russia for a wedding. Whelan was later charged [...]
France’s data protection watchdog group (CNIL) fined Alphabet’s Google on Monday for breaching EU internet privacy rules. The €50 million (USD $57 million) fine is the largest penalty thus imposed on a US tech company, thanks to an increase in sanction limits under the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR, enacted in [...]
The US Supreme Courtissued an order on Tuesday to reverse a lower court’s injunction preventing the Trump administration from implementing its ban on transgender individuals from serving in the military. The Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the injunction in November. The injunction, issued by the US District Court for the Western District [...]
When the Delhi High Court sentenced a former parliamentarian to life in prison for his role in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in December, it ended an excruciating 34-year ordeal for victims of the hate crime that shook India’s national conscience and threatened to tear apart its social fabric. Spurts of sectarian violence are not uncommon in [...]
A spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said Friday that they are concerned over Montenegro’s sentencing of investigative journalist Jovo Martinović. Martinović was sentenced to 18 months in prison on charges of drug smuggling and membership in a criminal organization, what the OHCHR believes were likely “politically motivated as credible [...]
Virginia’s state senate passed a bill on Thursday by a vote of 23-17 that prohibits the state from sentencing defendants with severe mental illness to death. The bill defines “severe mental illness” as the “exhibition of active psychotic symptoms that substantially impair a person’s capacity to (i) appreciate the nature, consequences, or wrongfulness of the person’s conduct; (ii) exercise [...]
Ethiopia’s House of Peoples’ Representatives passed a law on Thursday that will grant expansive rights to the nation’s refugee population. These rights include the right to “obtain work permits, access primary education, obtain drivers’ licenses, legally register life events such as births and marriages and open up access to national financial services, such as banking.” Ethiopia [...]
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, on Thursday asked the government of Sudan to protect its people’s rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. Since mid-December 2018, demonstrations have been taking place in multiple cities across Sudan. As of January 6th, 816 people have been arrested, including “journalists, opposition leaders, protestors [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Thursday filed a lawsuit against seven federal agencies, intending to obtain information on how the government surveils social media. The suit seeks to compel the agencies to turn over documents related to communications with social media platforms and the guidelines they use. The suit accuses the agencies of [...]
The Supreme Court of India on Thursday upheld the constitutional validity of a law imposing restrictions on the licensing and functioning of dance bars in the state of Maharashtra and its capital Mumbai. At the same, it struck down certain provisions of the law that it deemed unconstitutional and unreasonable. Dance bars have been at [...]
