Russian lawmakers unanimously passed a bill on Friday to ban gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people in the country. The Chairman of the Russian State Duma Viacheslav Volodin announced the bill’s passage on his Telegram channel, claiming the bill will protect Russian citizens and children. The bill prohibits surgery and hormone therapy for transgender individuals as [...]

Israel’s Knesset voted Monday to advance a bill seeking to restrict the Supreme Court’s powers by limiting their ability to overrule governmental decision-making. Having cleared its first reading, the bill must now be passed through two more Knesset votes before becoming law. The bill at issue is Netanyahu’s ruling coalition’s new “scaled down” reform bill, [...]

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Wednesday announced that an Ottawa man accused of “advocating a violent far-right ideology” was arrested and faces both terrorism and hate propaganda charges, which the RCMP states is a first for Canadian law enforcement. The accused is alleged to have helped to produce three “terrorist propaganda videos” for the [...]

Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s media company Patriot Media Group announced its closure Saturday in the continuing aftermath of Prigozhin’s brief march towards Moscow, which saw him exiled from Russia. The Moscow Times also reported that the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll factory” implicated in the 2016 US election meddling scandal, had shut down as part [...]

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine on Tuesday released a report which details the arbitrary detention, torture, and occasional killing of civilians by Russian armed forces in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report describes the Russian Federation’s widespread practice of arbitrarily detaining civilians in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine. The [...]

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled Thursday that Hungary’s restrictive asylum laws passed during the COVID-19 pandemic violated European Union (EU) law. The law requires that foreign nationals seeking international protection in Hungary first submit declarations of intent at the Hungarian embassies in Belgrade, Serbia or Kyiv, Ukraine. The Court found that the condition [...]

A Quebec Superior Court justice Wednesday denied a request for an emergency injunction against a ban on prayer rooms in schools that was instituted by the provincial government last month. In a joint challenge, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) argued on behalf of a Muslim student [...]

Canada Supreme Court Justice Russell Brown announced his immediate retirement Monday, halting the ongoing misconduct probe which has kept Brown off the bench since February. The probe, conducted by the Canadian Judicial Council (CJC), stemmed from an alcohol-fueled altercation at an Arizona resort in late January. During the altercation, Brown was physically assaulted by another [...]

French union activists and protesters once again took to the streets Tuesday to protest the controversial pension reform bill, which first sparked mass protests back in January. While tens of thousands of people still turned out to protest, the turnout—as of the time of this report—is lower than previous protests. Since the last protests, France enacted [...]

Canadian MPs passed a non-binding motion Wednesday calling on special rapporteur David Johnston to step aside from his role investigating allegations of foreign interference in Canadian elections, which Johnston quickly rejected. The vote comes as the latest development in the ongoing furor over whether Canada should launch a public inquiry on the matter of foreign [...]