Chilean President Sebastián Piñera signed a bill into law on Thursday that will lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse cases involving minors. Originally introduced in 2010, the bill was reintroduced at Piñera’s urging after a surge in reports that former Santiago Cardinals Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa and Ricardo Ezzati had covered up allegations of [...]

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published a report on Monday that showed that organized crime kills more people than armed conflict. According to the report, “rganized crime kills as many people as all armed conflicts combined.” The report also stated that “up to 19 per cent of all homicides recorded globally in [...]

In a report released Thursday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet urged Venezuela to take immediate steps to address “grave violations of economic, social, civil, political and cultural rights” in the country. The report warns that if the situation does not improve, an unprecedented outflow of Venezuelan migrants and refugees will continue [...]

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal voted on Thursday to criminalize homophobia and transphobia. In an 8-3 decision, the court approved a three-point thesis holding that LGBTQ discrimination should be understood to fall within the nation’s prohibition against racism until the National Congress can issue a law specifically addressing this matter. Brazil’s legislature outlawed racism in 1989 [...]

Canada’s House of Commons approved a bill Monday known as the “Ending the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins Act.” While the short title of the bill includes whales and dolphins, the Act defines cetacean as “any member of the cetacean order, including a whale, dolphin or porpoise.” The Act amends the Criminal Code to ban [...]

The Advocate General for the Court of Justice of the EU stated Tuesday that social media sites can “be ordered to seek and identify all comments identical to a defamatory comment that has been found to be illegal, and equivalent comments in so far as the latter originate from the same user.” The case arose [...]

Kenya’s High Court on Friday upheld a ban on gay sex. The Kenyan Penal Code makes it a felony to have “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature” or to commit “gross indecency.” The sentence for these offenses ranges from 5-21 years in prison. Kenya’s Constitution guarantees human dignity and freedom from [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday reversed the district court’s dismissal of a class action lawsuit against French bank BNP Paribas over aiding atrocities in Sudan. The lawsuit was brought in 2016 by 21 refugees from Sudan’s ethnic-cleansing campaign alleging that the bank conspired with and aided and abetted the [...]

Swedish prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson on Monday requested the District Court of Sweden to detain WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in his absence. Assange is currently in prison serving 25 weeks of a 50-week sentence in the UK after hiding in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for almost seven years. After serving his sentence in the [...]

Myanmar President Win Myint granted amnesty on Monday to 6,520 prisoners, including journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The journalists, reporters for Reuters, were arrested in September for alleged violations of Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act and sentenced to seven years in prison for their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report into the military’s violence against the [...]