New Zealand’s Parliament on Thursday suspended three Māori lawmakers for staging a protest that included performing the haka, a traditional Māori dance, in opposition to a controversial bill. Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, who are the co-leaders of the Te Pāti Māori party, were suspended without pay for 21 days following a vote by a [...]

Amnesty International reported on Friday that women participating in protests against the government in Georgia have been subjected to intimidation, harassment, and gender-based physical and psychological violence by state authorities. In addition to searches of detained protestors, the rights group stated there has been a growing tendency of arbitrary house and office searches, stop-and-search practices [...]

Italy’s price comparison platform Moltiply filed a €2.97 billion damages claim against Alphabet’s Google search engine on Friday, alleging anti-competitive conduct and abuse of dominance that favored Google Shopping between 2010 and 2017. Moltiply alleged that its subsidiary 7Pixel, which operates the comparison site Trovaprezzi, was harmed by Google’s self-preferencing practices, which abused its market [...]

A UN official raised concerns on Wednesday over North Korea’s “troubling pattern” of weapons testing, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and intermediate-range hypersonic missiles. UN Assistant Secretary-General Khaled Khiari warned that the persistent pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs defies international law and “continue to undermine the global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime.” [...]

UN experts on Wednesday condemned the enforced disappearance and apparent summary execution of some 100  individuals in Mali. The experts stated that the unlawful killings may amount to war crimes and that the enforced disappearance may constitute crimes against humanity. The experts found that the Malian authorities have violated the right to life by failing to [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported Tuesday that Jordanian authorities forcibly evicted and demolished residences in an informal Palestinian refugee camp in Amman without following proper procedures, as part of an urban development project. The project’s stated goals include improving living conditions, managing urban growth, and recovering the costs of upgrading and expanding infrastructure facilities through [...]

The Petrogradsky District Court of St. Petersburg in Russia has sentenced 19-year-old activist Daria Kozyreva to two years and eight months in prison for “discrediting the armed forces” by publicly posting 19th-century Ukrainian poetry in protest of Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to local media sources. Kozyreva began her anti-war activism in 2022, the year [...]

UN experts on Thursday urged Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to immediately impose a moratorium on inhumane punishments, including capital and corporal punishments, in response to public executions carried out on April 11. The Taliban’s de facto supreme court last week imposed four public executions across the provinces of Badghis, Nimroz and Farah. The experts stated: “Friday’s [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Thursday that most countries are failing to meet their human rights obligations by not allocating sufficient public funding to ensure the right to health. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently published its Global Health Expenditure Database (GHED), which offers data on healthcare spending across 194 countries and territories since 2022. [...]

UN human rights experts on Friday called on Pakistan to stop displacing Afghans from the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and further urged authorities not to carry out deportations to Afghanistan. The UN experts urged the Pakistani government to continue its role as a neighboring host country for Afghan refugees. The experts stated: “We urge [...]