Pakistan-administered territories of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) are witnessing one of their most serious episodes of political unrest in recent years, as protests led by Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) have escalated into deadly confrontations with security forces, disrupting elections, transport, and public life across several districts. While AJK enjoys some level [...]

Marta Schaaf, Amnesty International’s program director for climate, social justice and corporate accountability, said Wednesday in a statement that the extreme heat driving wildfires, drought and floods across multiple continents amounts to a human rights emergency. She urged national governments to protect people now and to confront the fossil fuel industry Amnesty blames for the [...]

An attorney for several incarcerated transgender women argued Wednesday that the Trump administration violated a court order by transferring them to a segregated prison unit, and urged a federal judge to enforce the order. Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia heard the argument in Doe v. McHenry, [...]

UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a statement Wednesday calling for fresh talks to help rebuild trust between Cyprus island’s two divided communities, in a move to resolve the decades-long tension and find a sustainable political solution. Guterres explained the role of the UN, as well as the significance of a peaceful resolution to the lengthy [...]

UN human rights experts on Wednesday raised alarm over reports of torture, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention of members of Iran’s Bahá’í religious minority amid the ongoing US-Iran war. The UN experts say that approximately 57 Bahá’ís are currently detained or imprisoned in Iran. They report allegations of arbitrary and incommunicado detention, physical and psychological [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday called for the immediate release of a social media commentator who was sentenced to six years of imprisonment for criticizing the Vietnamese government, stating that her conviction is a violation to the right to freedom of expression. In January, blogger Hoang Thi Hong Thai was arrested after she made [...]

When the dead of a war are sorted into political categories before they are mourned, something more basic than compassion is lost: the condition that makes legal judgment possible at all. I heard that loss in a Telegram voice message from a friend, recorded as the ongoing conflict reached Iran’s southern provinces and people around [...]

Men in plain clothes swung lathis—the long wooden batons Indian police carry for crowd control—at student protesters on New Delhi’s Parliament Street on July 20, striking them alongside uniformed officers while wearing nothing that marked them as police. Indian law conditions a police officer’s immunity from a citizen’s right of private defense on precisely that: [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday ruled unanimously that a partial privative clause cannot bar judicial review on questions of fact and law. It held that judicial review on such questions is the courts’ “core supervisory jurisdiction” guaranteed by the Constitution. Chief Justice Richard Wagner, writing for the bench, held that Canada’s Constitution Act, [...]