Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for East and Southern Africa Khanyo Farise urged Zimbabwean authorities on Wednesday to immediately release over 70 detained members of the opposition party Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) and withdraw all their charges unconditionally. According to Farise, Zimbabwean authorities breached Zimbabwe’s Constitution and international human rights obligations by arbitrarily detaining [...]

Indonesia’s Jakarta Corruption Court sentenced former agriculture minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo to 10 years in prison over graft charges on Thursday, according to local outlet The Jakarta Post. Judge Rianto Adam Pontoh said Limpo was fined and ordered to compensate 300 million rupiah and about 14.6 billion rupiah, respectively. The court found Limpo guilty of [...]

Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal certified three questions in activist Tam Tak-chi’s bid to appeal his sedition convictions to the Court of Final Appeal under section 32(2) of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal Ordinance on Wednesday. Section 32(2) requires the mid-level appeals court to determine whether a case involves an important point of [...]

Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday that a Saudi Arabia court sentenced 47-year-old Saudi teacher Asaad al-Ghamdi to 20 years in prison over charges relating to his social media activity. Asaad al-Ghamdi is the brother of Saeed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a government critic living in the UK. Human Rights Watch said that Saudi authorities often [...]

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi urged the international community on Sunday to provide humanitarian assistance to Afghans in and outside the country in light of the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), at least 18 million and over 3.5 million Afghans needed urgent humanitarian assistance and were displaced [...]

The Supreme Court of Japan declared a transgender woman as the father of her daughter, who was conceived after the woman’s legal gender change, for the first time on Friday. In Friday’s ruling, which overturned a 2022 Tokyo High Court decision, the court held that Japan’s Civil Code and other laws do not prevent a [...]

UN Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor warned on Wednesday that human rights defenders are increasingly targeted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), especially in the eastern region of the country, amid intensifying armed conflict. Lawlor said that human rights defenders in the DRC are continuously intimidated, attacked and killed even though authorities have been [...]

Violence against children in armed conflict reached “extreme levels” in 2023, rising by 21 percent to 30,705, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated in a report on Thursday. According to Guterres, severe violations and disregard for international human rights law contributed to the increase in grave violations against children. The number of killed and maimed children [...]

The US Department of Treasury sanctioned Hong Kong companies under Executive Order (EO) 14024 on Wednesday in response to the companies’ alleged support of Russia’s economy amid the War in Ukraine. This comes after the US unveiled nearly 300 sanctions on May 1, including sanctions that target entities in Hong Kong for their support of [...]

The Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) union filed complaints against Saudi Arabia with the UN’s International Labor Organization (ILO) claiming that at least 21,000 migrant workers in Saudi Arabia suffered from severe human rights abuses and wage theft for over 10 years mainly by two now-liquidated Saudi companies. According to BWI’s Wednesday complaints, Saudi [...]