The United Nations Human Rights Office Wednesday criticized President Trump for pardoning former Blackwater contractors who were jailed in the US for killing 14 Iraqi civilians. On Tuesday, Trump granted full pardons to the former Blackwater contractors. The contractors had been previously sentenced to life imprisonment in August 2019 for the murders that took place [...]

Ugandan authorities Tuesday arrested prominent human rights lawyer Nicholas Opiyo. Eyewitnesses maintain that plainclothes police handcuffed Opiyo along with four others and drove them away in vehicles with tinted windows. Since the arrest, Opiyo has had no contact with his lawyers or his family, a violation of both international human rights law and African human [...]

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Article 1, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution offers greater protection to citizens from warrantless searches of their vehicles than does the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Prior to the ruling, Pennsylvania precedent held that the federal automobile exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment [...]

Federal judge Kristine Baker of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas issued Tuesday a temporary restraining order that halted four Arkansas anti-abortion regulations from taking effect. In 2017, the Arkansas legislature passed a set of abortion laws that included a ban on the common abortion method of dilation and extraction, as well as [...]

US President Donald Trump granted Tuesday full pardons to 15 individuals and commuted part or entire sentences of another five individuals. Among those pardoned are George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan, both convicted of making false statements to the FBI as part of the Mueller investigation. The White House emphasized that these were “process-related crimes” and [...]

New statistics published Monday by Transform Justice and the Howard League for Penal Reform show that 87 percent of children held in remand between July and September in London come from Black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. Additionally, 61 percent of the children held were of Black ethnicity.  The Lammy Review had previously outlined [...]

Several large tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn filed Monday an amicus brief in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Facebook’s lawsuit against Israeli surveillance company NSO. NSO creates cyber-surveillance tools, which it then sells to foreign governments and other customers. Those customers can use the tools to track individuals’ [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet addressed Tuesday allegations of human rights and humanitarian law violations in Ethiopia, calling for an investigation into the allegations and protection of Ethiopian civilians. The conflict between central government soldiers and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began seven weeks ago, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. [...]

A Texas-led coalition of nine states urged Tuesday a federal judge to invalidate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), arguing that DACA was unlawfully created by former President Barack Obama. The DACA program has enabled thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children to work, pursue higher education, live without risk of [...]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) held Tuesday that Turkey is to take all necessary measures to secure the immediate release of Selahattin Demirtaş, a Kurdish politician held by the Turkish government on terrorism charges. The Grand Chamber held that there had been multiple violations of the European Convention of Human Rights. It also found no [...]