UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the 40th session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) on Monday by denouncing an increase in threats to human rights worldwide. Guterres began his address by emphasizing the HRC’s role as “the epicentre for … the protection of all human rights” and highlighted areas of progress including a global reduction in poverty [...]

A group of UN human rights experts on Thursday urged Iran to halt the execution of a man who committed a crime when he was 15 years old. Mohammad Kalhori, “was sentenced to death for killing his teacher when he was 15 years old.” Recently, it has been reported that his family was told to [...]

An Appeals Court in Turkey on Tuesday upheld the convictions of 14 employees of Cumhuriyet, a Turkish news outlet that has been critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The defendants—including journalists, a cartoonist, executives and accountants—were sentenced in April to prison terms between four and eight years “on charges of acting on behalf of a terrorist group [...]

An Australian Court on Friday ruled against the development of a coal mine in New South Wales because of its potential as a climate change contributor. The mine proposed, an open cut coal mine, is a process in which coal, closer to the surface, is extracted from the earth by its removal from an open [...]

Former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo and political leader Charles Ble Goude were released on bail to Belgium Tuesday after being acquitted last month on charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In 2010 Gbagbo lost the presidency and was accused of starting a civil war by refusing to cede the [...]

UN human rights experts on Tuesday urged Brazil to comply with its international legal obligations to curtail torture. The UN experts expressed concern regarding São Paulo Governor João Doria’s veto of anti-torture legislation in January. São Paulo law N° 1257 would have established a State Committee for Preventing and Combating Torture and also included several controversial provisions regulating police [...]

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Friday that the US will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a nuclear arms control pact between the US and Russia established during the Cold War. The INF treaty “bans ground-launched missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.” Pompeo cited Russian noncompliance with the [...]

The UK Supreme Court on Thursday disposed of appeals from the government against several respondents who said that they were harmed by the disclosure of their relatively minor offenses. The case involved several respondents who had “all been convicted or received cautions or reprimands in respect of relatively minor offending.” While their records only included [...]

A senior judge at one of the UN courts in The Hague is reportedly resigning over “shocking” political interference from the White House and Turkey. Christoph Flügge, a German judge, claims that the US had threatened other judges who took steps to investigate the conduct of US soldiers in Afghanistan. He also claims that Turkey [...]

Angola’s parliament approved a new penal code Wednesday that drops provisions widely interpreted to criminalize homosexuality. The new penal code is Angola’s first since it gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. The prior code contained many holdover provisions from the colonial era, including a ban of “vices against nature,” which was understood to criminalize [...]