On Saturday, the National People’s Congress of China enacted a measure establishing a new intellectual property court in the southern island of Hainan. China has sought to strengthen Hainan’s position as a global free trade port in the South China Sea, competing with other shipping centers in the area such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and [...]

Viasna, a non-governmental human rights center in Belarus, said that seven more people were detained in Belarus on Sunday during the traditional weekend protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, who won his sixth term in office in a disputed election. The total number of detainees is now reported to be over twenty people. According to a [...]

Congressman Louie Gohmert and a group of Republican electors from Arizona filed a lawsuit on Sunday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, arguing that the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional. The complaint asserts that the Electoral Count Act’s dispute resolution provisions violate the Electors Clause and the Twelfth Amendment of the [...]

The Turkish Parliament passed a law Sunday aimed at controlling terrorism after two days of debate. Entitled the “Law on Preventing the Financing of the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” the new legislation includes controversial amendments to an existing law on aid collection. These amendments enable the government, led by President Tayyip Erdogan, to [...]

The European Commission Saturday published the proposed Brexit trade agreement between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) that was announced Thursday. Since the UK officially left the EU on January 31, it has been in an 11-month transition period. During this period, the UK did not have representation in the European Parliament [...]

The cabinet of Indian state Madhya Pradesh approved the Dharma Swatantrya (Religious Freedom) Bill 2020 on Saturday, just days ahead of the state’s winter assembly session. It is the second Indian state to pass a law against religious conversion only for the sake of marriage. Indicating the intent behind the anti-conversion bill, Chief Minister Shivraj [...]

China will now hold children as young as 12 years old criminally liable for crimes deemed “abominable,” according to China Daily. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) on Saturday also introduced punishment for intellectual property infringement that could lead to 10 years in prison. The Standing Committee said an “abominable” crime would [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Thursday that the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) unlawfully rescheduled Lisa Montgomery’s execution while a stay on her sentence was in place. Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row in the US, was originally scheduled to be executed on December 8 [...]

A coalition of human rights groups Wednesday joined WhatsApp’s lawsuit against Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group and accused the company of selling Pegasus surveillance software to government agencies to target human rights activists under the guise of terrorism laws. The groups filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, alleging [...]

President of Burundi Evariste Ndayishimiye Thursday pardoned  four journalists who were imprisoned for “attempting to undermine state security.” The Head of the Information and Communications Division for the Office of the President, Willy Nyamitwe, tweeted Thursday that Ndayishimiye “has favorably responded” to a letter from journalists Agnès Ndirubusa, Christine Kamikazi, Egide Harerimana, and Térence Mpozenzi requesting a [...]